Unsong

by Scott Alexander

  Father Ellis sat with Jalaketu on a wall on the main street. The boy had sent Uncle Vihaan to find explosives. Sent wasn’t exactly the right word; the boy had said he was going to find explosives, and Vihaan had declared there was no way he was going to let the boy anywhere near explosives, and if they needed explosives for some reason, he was going to be the one to get them – which had clearly been Jala’s plan all along. Vihaan was some kind of mining engineer and apparently good at these things.

  “So,” asked Father Ellis. “Who are you?”

  “My mother died during childbirth,” said Jalaketu. “I killed her. I didn’t know. I was too big. I was growing as fast as I could, because I knew there wasn’t enough time, but I didn’t realize. I only barely remember. I remember that I was very sad, and that I decided I must be more careful from now on, and never let anybody die again.”

  He didn’t say “anybody close to me.” He didn’t sound like he meant it.

  “Comet West is my father,” said Jalaketu. “My mother told Uncle Vihaan so, before she died. It talks to me sometimes, in my dreams. It loves me and it wants me to be happy. Sometimes it scares me, though. I think it is an archangel.”

  Father Ellis didn’t know what to say.

  “It says I must be Moshiach. It tells me stories from the Torah as I fall asleep. And other stories, too, from a big book that it wrote a very long time ago. And I try to grow as fast as I can, so I can understand them, but it’s never fast enough. This body is too weak. I want to walk into a fire and burn my body away and stop being human, and then I can be a comet too, and it will all make sense.”

  “You said you were looking for a priest,” said Father Ellis. “Are you a Christian?”

  “No.” Jalaketu smiled. “My mother was a Hindu, but Hinduism passes through the paternal line. My father, perhaps if he teaches me Torah then he is Jewish. But Judaism passes through the maternal line. I am nothing.”

  “Christianity doesn’t pass through any line,” said Father Ellis. “It’s open to anyone who wants it. And I mention it because it has a lot to say on the issue of incarnating as a human. It’s hard. Really hard sometimes. But definitely very important.”

  “That’s what my father says too,” said Jalaketu. “He says that I had to be human. But it is…yes. It is hard.”

  Vihaan chose that moment to come back in Ellis’s beat-up Chevy Nova. The trunk was open and packed with ominous-looking boxes.

  “Okay,” he said, pulling up in front of the other two. “Now what?”

  “This is the part where it gets complicated,” said Jalaketu.

  “Something else your father told you in a dream?” asked Ellis.

  “Not…exactly,” said Jalaketu. “It’s something that I…hope will work.”

  Oh God, prayed Father Ellis. Have mercy on us, your poor servants….

  III.

  Jala West stood alone in the middle of Interstate Highway 70, just outside Silverthorne. The mountains rose on either side of him like walls. This was the chokepoint. They would pass through here.

  From the distance came a faint rumbling. An oppressive heat filled the air. The smell of sulfur. Hot winds began to blow. To the west of the valley, a red-black cloud came into view.

  They had fought a series of battles with the Canadians and their American allies. Outside Calgary, the alliance had lost decisevely. From there the hosts of Hell had split in two. Half, under the demon princes Adramelech, Asmodei, and Rahab, had gone east to complete the conquest of Ottawa, New York City, and the American East Coast. The other half, under the command of Thamiel himself, had gone south and west, to root out American resistance in California and the West. They had gone as far south as Ogden, but the Mormons in Salt Lake City had resisted tooth and nail, and now there was a siege. The siege was not going so well for the demons, because supplies and reinforcements kept coming in on Interstate 70 from Colorado. Blockading the Interstate had just redirected the supplies onto a hundred smaller mountain roads the demons couldn’t follow.

  Thamiel was not used to being resisted. He decided to take things into his own hands. A sortie into Colorado. Fort Collins, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver – all the big cities, lined up nice in a row – were to be taken out, completing the desolation of America between the Rockies and the Mississippi. The Mormons’ supply route would be removed. Salt Lake would fall.

  So onward went the Hosts of Hell, onward along Interstate 70. They burnt Grand Junction, they razed Glenwood Springs, they demolished Vail. At last, beside the highest peaks of the Rockies, they came to Silverthorne, and there in the middle of the highway was Jala West.

  The demons themselves had not yet taken physical form; they buzzed and seethed like a thundercloud of darkness covering the plains. But Thamiel marched ahead of them, alone as a visible figure. His suit was impeccable and his steps were inhumanly fast, and the whole mass of darkness followed in a wedge behind him. When he saw the little boy standing in front of him, he stopped.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I am Jala West,” said the boy.

  “Run away,” said Thamiel.

  “Tell me,” said Jala, “if this were a story, and the Devil and all his demons were marching against a peaceful nation, and in their way was only one young boy, wielding a sword made from a falling star…”

  “You don’t have a sword made from a fallen star,” Thamiel pointed out.

  The roar of a meteor split the sky, a fireball that briefly surpassed the daylight with the brightness of its passage. It came closer and closer, aimed straight at them, and Jalaketu held out his hand and caught it. A huge black sword with a silver hilt, almost bigger than he was. It was still fiery hot, and far too big for him, but he held it without fear.

  “I do so,” said Jala.

  Thamiel snarled.

  “If this were a story,” Jalaketu continued, “and you were challenged by just one boy, wielding a sword made from a fallen star, here because he wouldn’t abandon his homeland – do you think it would end well for you? For the demon?”

  “Are you going to ask for my surrender?” snarled Thamiel.

  “No,” said Jala. “There is no surrender I can accept. If you left Colorado, I would follow you. If you left America, I would hunt you down. Even if you left the world entirely and returned to Hell, I could not allow this. And I cannot allow you to keep this army. It is too dangerous. Everything about this is dangerous. I should not have come myself; I should have found some way to delay you from afar. But I had to come. The Bible says you are the adversary, the tempter, who takes the measure of Man. But who takes your measure? I came here to delay you, but also to take your measure. And also to get something I needed. And also because I am angry. This is my home. I would defend it even if it were not, but it is.”

  He drew a signal gun from his pocket and fired a flare. It streaked through the sky, a little anticlimactic after the recent meteor strike. The mountains echoed with the sound, but there was no other answer.

  Then the demon fell upon him, wielding a bident whose cuts and slices were almost too fast for the human eye to follow. Jalaketu parried easily with his sword, the great sword Sigh, the sword his father had made for him, the sword which would always answer the call of him and his descendants wherever they might be. The air sizzled with the speed of their battle; the earth trembled with the force of their blows.

  Then Jalaketu drew blood. Just a tiny bit, a glancing blow on the demon’s stunted forearm. It sizzled on the blade, etching weird damascene patterns into the steel.

  “All right,” said the Lord of Demons. “Let’s do this the easy way.”

  He gave a signal to the vast cloud that hovered above them, and all the legions of Hell flew down into the valley at once. Jalaketu just watched them come, holding his sword out in front of him, as if they were no more than a few approaching wisps of cloud.

  Then the roar of the oncoming demons before him was matched by a similar roar behind him. Something greyish-white and colo
ssal, so big that at first it was hard to identify. As it came closer, it took on more features. Water. Rushing water. A whole reservoir’s worth.

  Thamiel was not impressed. “That was your plan?” he asked. “Blowing up the dam? You do know that demons don’t drown, right?”

  The oncoming wall of holy water crashed into the hosts of Hell with a bang and snuffed them out like sparks before a fire extinguisher. The whole massacre only lasted seconds. Jalaketu spoke the Ascending Name and hovered above the devastation, making sure that no demons were left, that not a single one had survived.

  “I know,” said Jalaketu, to nobody in particular. And then, more solemnly: “And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, and the idols are broke in the temple of Baal. And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.”

  Then he descended back to ground level and waded through the wreckage until he reached town.

  IV.

  Father Ellis’s old Nova drove down route 24 into Colorado Springs. The traffic was more haphazard now. Some people were still trying to evacuate. Other people had heard rumors that something had changed, and were trying to go back home. A few people didn’t know which way they were going. The 24 was empty; the 25 was a mess. When Ellis reached the junction, he gave up, pulled over, and stopped the car. The three of them walked out onto the empty highway.

  “Never been here before, actually,” the priest said.

  “My hometown,” said Jalaketu. “This is where it has to start.”

  “Where what has to start?” asked Vihaan. “Jala, be careful.”

  Whatever had to start, this seemed as good a place as any. The city center rose before them, a few buildings that toyed with the idea of being skyscrapers; the slightest hint of a downtown. Then the long ribbon of cars stretching either direction, honking, all of Colorado on the road. On one side, the stunning rock formations that a nineteenth-century romantic had dubbed the Garden of the Gods. To the other, the looming massif of Cheyenne Mountain in whose bowels the United States kept the nerve center controlling its nuclear armament. Towering above all of it, the sharp snow-capped ridge of Pike’s Peak.

  Jalaketu spoke the Ascending Name and rose into the air. Then another Name, and the sky seemed to dim, like all the sunlight was concentrated on him and him alone. People started to notice. The honking died down. A few brave souls left their cars to get a better view. The windows on some of the buildings peeked open.

  Then he spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, but somehow it carried, carried down past all the cars frozen below, into the buildings downtown, over the ridges and rivulets of the Garden of the Gods, and all throughout the city.

  “I am Jalaketu West,” he said, “son of Comet West. Colorado is safe for now. It’s safe because I saved it. But not for long. Demons don’t die forever, they just disintegrate and rebuild themselves. And it’s not just demons. The cracks in the sky are getting bigger. The world is falling apart. I don’t know if I can save all of you. But somebody has to, and no one else will. So I am going to try. I need all of your help. If you follow me, it won’t be easy. You’ll have to have faith. But I will be worthy of it. I promise. In the Name of God, in whose Name oaths must never be sworn in vain, I promise. This is how it has to be. I am the Comet King. Bow. Swear fealty. Now.”

  At first everyone was quiet, too flabbergasted for any reaction, and then they all started talking to each other. “Holy God,” and “He thinks he…” and “He says we’re saved?” and “How is he floating there?” and a thousand other questions and worries and exclamations and fears.

  In the end, they were Americans, and they didn’t bow. But finally one of them, an old Korean War vet, gave a salute. Then another man saluted, and another, and soon the whole city was saluting him.

  And Jalaketu laughed, and said “It’ll do,” because there were parts of him that were very old and far away, and other parts that were as American as apple pie, and truth be told he wouldn’t have bowed down either. So he laughed and saluted back at them, and then he lowered himself back onto the highway.

  “King?” asked Uncle Vihaan, with a miserable look on his face, like he had always known it would come to this but had hoped it wouldn’t happen quite so quickly.

  “Yes,” said Jalaketu. “And I’ll need advisors I can trust. Once you find Aunt Samira and get her somewhere safe, come back here so we can talk at more length. And you – ” he said to Father Ellis.

  “Yes?” asked the priest.

  “I’ll need your advice too.”

  “I am just about the least qualified person to advise anyone on anything.”

  “I need you to teach me what you were talking about before. How to be human. How to bear it.”

  Father Ellis swallowed. “I’ll try,” he said.

  And then suddenly the boy was all smiles again. “Let’s go,” he said. “Get to city center. I’m sure there are a lot of people there who will want to talk to us.” He skipped forward, almost gaily, his comet-white hair trailing behind him in the wind.

  Vihaan and Ellis looked at each other.

  “I guess all we can do is follow,” the priest said, and the two of them started after him.

  Chapter 30: Over The Dark Deserts

  You don’t truly understand necromancy if you can’t explain it to your great-great-great-grandmother.

  — Steven Kaas

  Evening, May 12, 2017

  Mojave Desert

  I.

  California shifted around us. Plains, then mountains, then taller mountains sloping down at last into a mind-boggling flatness of desert. And there we were. I had spent my entire life in that tiny strip of California coastline between the mountains and the sea. Now I was in the real West, a Biblical wilderness of scrub and harsh rocks unlike anything I had seen before. The land where the great dramas of the late twentieth century had played out, the twin stories of the Comet King and the Other King. In the blazing sunlight it felt more real and solid than the dreamland I had left behind.

  We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the Wall Drug signs began to appear.

  Before the sky cracked, Wall Drug had been a shopping center in South Dakota. There aren’t a lot of things in South Dakota, so the owners of the shopping center had tried to turn it into a tourist attraction. They put up billboards along the highway – “Only thirty miles to Wall Drug!” – “Only twenty miles to Wall Drug!” – “Only another ten miles to go before WALL DRUG!” Presumably the expectation of getting ever closer would turn an ordinary shopping center into some sort of transcendental recreational/commercial experience. The radius had grown. “Only fifty miles to Wall Drug!” “Wall Drug, in just another hundred miles!” Finally, it metastasized through the entire Midwest, becoming the omphalos of its own coordinate system: “I don’t know what state we’re in, but it’s only another two hundred eighty miles to Wall Drug.” Some wag at US McMurdo Station had briefly planted a “9,333 Miles To Wall Drug” sign at the South Pole.

  After the sky cracked, the Wall Drug coordinate system started to impose itself more and more upon the ordinary coordinate system of longitude and latitude. Worse, the two didn’t exactly correspond. You could be driving from New York to New Jersey, and find a billboard promising Wall Drug in only thirty miles. Drive another ten, and sure enough, WALL DRUG, TWENTY MILES. Drive ten more, and you’d be promised a South Dakotan shopping center, only ten miles away. Drive another ten, and…who knows? No one has returned from Wall Drug in a generation. It’s become not only an omphalos, but a black hole in the center of the United States, a one-way attraction and attractor fed by an interstate highway system which never gives up its prey. Some say it is in Heaven, others in Hell, others that it remains in South Dakota, from which no word has been heard for thirty years.

  Interstate travel is still possible, but it follows a very specific pattern. You go forward until you see a Wall Drug billboard. Then you hastily switch directions and go back to the p
revious city, transferring you back to the normal American landscape. Then you tentatively go forward again. After enough iterations, you can make it from Point A to Point B intact. But if ever you see a Wall Drug billboard and continue to travel, the land will start looking less and less like where you came from, more and more like the grassy semi-arid plains of South Dakota. Once that happens, you can still turn back. But if you turn back too late, you may find that Wall Drug is in that direction too, that every point of the compass brings you closer to Wall Drug, with no choice but to remain in place forever or go boldly towards that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

  This was what had happened to the Midwest. That close to the omphalos, even a few feet down a side street would be enough to lose yourself forever. Automobile travel became impossible between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Thousands of small farming communities lost their lifelines to the outside world. Large cities dependent on food shipments starved, right in the middle of amber fields of grain. Then came the Broadcast to finish them off. A few small farms survived here and there, but otherwise the Plains were as empty as they had been when the buffalo roamed.

  Jane cursed, and we started looking for an exit. We turned back to Barstow, then turned back around. We’d only gone about ten miles before another Wall Drug sign made us repeat the whole cycle.

  “I’m tired,” said Jane. “You drive.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said. I’d grown up in Oakland, which wasn’t very car-friendly. And by the time I turned sixteen, technology had declined to the point where only the more expensive models with the Motive Name were still working.

  “You put your foot on the pedal, and if something is in your way you turn this big wheel here,” said Jane. “It’s the Mojave Desert. There’s nothing for a hundred miles. You’ll live.”

  So I drove. It was a nice car. A white Cadillac. The scholars tell us that God drives a Plymouth Fury, for it is written in Jeremiah 32:37: “He drove them out of the land in His Fury”. But the Twelve Apostles shared a Honda Accord, for it is written in Acts 5:12: “They were all with one Accord”. The commentators speculate this may have been the same car Jesus used when he drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, though if there were more than four or so moneychangers it might have required a minor miracle. My mother used to have a really old beat-up Honda Accord. For all I know maybe it was the same one they used in the New Testament. It gave up the ghost after a year or so and we were back to taking buses.