How Like A God

by Brenda W Clough

  “Can you, like, do anything useful?”

  “I might’ve turned some of the Lorton convicts around. I sneaked out

  yesterday to experiment with it. And I told the office I was there. So when the fire broke out they all swore to the fire department that I was still in the building. I’m afraid I’m responsible for that fireman’s death yesterday.”

  There, it was out. Rob sagged in his chair with relief. Disappointingly, the horror of it didn’t seem to strike Julianne very greatly. “That’s a fireman’s job, hon. They know what they’re getting into. And what are you wasting your energy at Lorton for? There’s lots of better things to do with this!”

  “I knew you’d have some ideas,” Rob said with pride.

  Julianne began to pace slowly back and forth from the sofa to the TV cart, frowning with thought. “You can tell people what to think. Let me see. Lobbyist, of course. We get the National Rifle Association or somebody to hire you as a lobbyist, and bingo, all the senators help you ram through gun legislation.”

  “Holy mackerel!” Rob exclaimed in horror. “You know, Jul, I’m not a mover-and-shaker kind of guy! Besides, I think there are too many guns already!”

  “That’s just an example, hon. What about PR? Convince everybody to drink Florida orange juice, or buy panty hose. Or, I know! You could run for

  public office! If you tell people to vote for you, they would, right?”

  “Well, sure, but—”

  “How lucky that this is the off year! I don’t think it’s too late yet to file to be on the ballot this November. You could start in one of the local races, say for the state legislature. Then in two years pick up a House seat, run for governor in ‘98—” Julianne counted quickly on her perfectly-manicured fingers. “You’d be in a good position to make a Presidential run in 2004!”

  “But I don’t want to be President!”

  “But you literally can’t lose! So why not?”

  Rob almost stuttered, trying to get the words out. “For one thing, if I was President, I’d actually have to do stuff—meet with foreign leaders, declare war, run the government—things like that. And I don’t know anything about it.”

  “So what? Does anybody? What difference will that make?”

  “Jul! We live in this country! Do you want it run into the ground by an ignoramus? Suppose I declare war against Canada or something?” Rob tried to stick to the point. “And another thing—would it be right, to make people vote for me? Or to buy orange juice, even?”

  “I don’t see how that’s different from running ads in the paper.”

  “But you can choose to read the ad. You can choose what kind of juice to buy. If I tell you which kind, you have no choice, Jul—none at all. You’d have more options if I held a gun to your head.”

  Julianne’s eyes flashed. “Well, by that argument, you’re just going to sit on this thing, and not accomplish anything with it!”

  On Thursday he had sworn there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. Rob felt trapped. He stood up and grabbed her hand. “Look, we don’t have to jump into anything right away. What I really want us to think about is, what kind of life do we want? Where do we want to go with this? For instance, have you really envisioned living with the twins in the White House?”

  The image made Julianne shudder. “And I never could stand Colonial furniture,” she admitted.

  “We have all the time in the world,” Rob said. “There’s no need to rush.”

  “How do you know that this ability won’t just go away, as fast as it came?”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t think so.” Rob turned away towards the window and looked out into the back yard. A chain-link fence enclosed the worn

  grass, and the cement patio was furnished with two aluminum lawn chairs, a rust-streaked barbecue grill, and a turtle-shaped sand box. “I’ve only gotten stronger, Jul. The number of people I can reach seems to be growing exponentially. Sometimes I wonder, is there any upper limit for me? How much more can it increase?”

  Julianne joined him, tucking her arm through his. From upstairs came a small tentative whoop. The twins were awake. “You know, what we do need is a picnic table,” she said. “We need money.” The ceiling bumped alarmingly above their heads as Angela rocked her crib on its casters. No more discussion was possible.

  The rest of the afternoon had to be frittered away on a series of minor errands. Rob bought a kitchen sink aerator and a concrete splash block from Hechinger’s, and the kids needed shoes. Angela and Davey were used to visiting the hardware store, but the relative novelty of Kmart intoxicated them. They ran screaming up and down the aisles of the shoe department while Julianne wavered between Barney sneakers and orange canvas high-tops.

  “I can’t concentrate,” she said peevishly. “It’s all your fault, you know.”

  “Me? What about them?” Rob protested, but then he understood. “Right—why can’t I have normal ailments, like everybody else?”

  She held up a midget pair of sneakers. “Rob, what would happen if you told the clerk we’d already paid for these?”

  Rob’s mouth opened in dismay. “But—I guess she’d believe me, but—it wouldn’t be true, Jul! It’d be shoplifting!”

  “I just wondered,” Julianne said in a nettled tone.

  Rob took a deep breath, but the words froze solid in his mouth. At the far end of the aisle, in naughty silence, the twins were scaling a floor-to-ceiling rack of men’s work boots. The entire unit was pulling away from the wall, toppling forwards under their combined toddler weight. Already the upper boots were falling.

  Julianne screamed. Rob reacted instinctively. There were trying-on benches and clusters of startled customers blocking the aisle, and he had never possessed bodily deftness. Instead he now thrust like a javelin into the head of the closest person, a black shoe clerk in a red Kmart shirt. As if by remote control, Rob twirled the slim young man around and jammed him like a two-by-four under the teetering boot rack. The shoe clerk whinnied with shock.

  Faster on her feet, Julianne plunged past the other shoppers and snatched a twin away with either hand. “You monkeys!” she cried.

  Rob followed and shoved the rack rattling back into a more stable configuration again. Around him a hail of tan work boots tumbled to the

  floor. “You saved them!” he said loudly to the stunned shoe clerk. He caught Julianne’s eye pleadingly.

  Julianne covered for him magnificently. “That was so brave and clever of you!” she caroled. She seized the clerk’s slim black hand in both her own and wrung it. “You saved my children from certain death! You’re a hero!”

  Everyone in earshot began to talk loudly and rapidly, exclaiming in wonder or explaining the situation to each other. Outraged at the abrupt interruption of their mountaineering expedition, the twins began to yowl.

  The store manager and several assistants hurried up, peppering everyone with questions and nervously examining the boot rack, visions of liability lawsuits dancing in their heads. The noise was immense.

  Trembling with reaction, Rob sat down on a try-on bench and hugged a wailing child in each arm. He had never done that before, forced a crude action on somebody like that. Thoughts, motives, memories even, but not action. Somehow the physical reality of this thing was a shock worse than a blow in the face. “I could do anything now,” he muttered into Angela’s damp blond curls. “Anything at all.” Shoplifting, derelicts, all that was small change. He could rule this country not like a President, but like a god.

  The thought made the sweat run cold down his armpits.

  Under the pure horsepower of Julianne’s praise, the store manager relaxed. “I’ll see to it that Mr. Akkam is our next Employee of the Month,” he said. “Good work, Akkam!” He patted the shoe clerk on the back.

  In a thick foreign accent Akkam said, “I did nothing. I did not know to move. I just do it.” His dark face was completely confused.

  “You were wonderful,” Julianne assured him. “What a su
perb sales staff you have here!”

  Keeping up a steady fulsome barrage, she swept the family up and through the cashier checkout to the door. At the last moment Rob pulled himself together enough to mutter to an assistant manager, “I’d use six-inch T-toggles to refasten that rack to the wall.”

  When the kids were safely buckled into their car seats, Julianne turned towards Rob. “Are you all right, hon?” He nodded, and in an undertone she said, “That was you, wasn’t it? You made that poor little man a hero.”

  “I wasn’t close enough to help with my own hands.”

  “So you borrowed his instead? Good job! I didn’t know you could jerk people around like that! Did it take a lot out of you, though? You look kind of shook up.”

  Rob sat down in the van’s open doorway. “It took nothing out of me, Jul. It was easy as snapping my fingers.” Very softly he added, “Jul, I’m scared.”

  “Pooh, you did exactly right.” She patted his cheek and slung the bagful of sneakers past him into the rear seat. “Come on, I’ll drive if you like. If we don’t feed them soon they’ll start whining.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Things began to roll at Chasbro the following day. Rob drove to a temporary setup at the building next to the old one. When everyone was assembled in the large echoing unfurnished space Danny announced, “Okay. The powers that be have given a tentative green light. The general game plan is this. A subcontracted salvage team flies in from L.A. tomorrow. The more daring of us will join them in digging through the rubble for disks and documentation and the backup tapes. Jeans and work boots, boys and girls. Lori, remember to swing by Hechinger’s for two dozen pairs of work gloves. The rest of us will start setting up diagnostic programs here. The mainframes will be delivered and set up by next week. And may God have mercy on us all, they still expect us to meet the October delivery deadline.”

  Groans burst out on all sides, but they were cheerful ones. Obviously everyone would continue to have a job for now. Workmen began to arrive to install partitions and telephones. A truckload of rented office furniture pulled up at the delivery dock. Someone set up the all-important coffee machine on the first unloaded desk. A pleasant uproar filled the sprawling space as it came to life.

  When one of the phone lines came on, Rob plugged a phone in and sat on the

  rug to phone Julianne. “Good news,” he said. “I’m still employed.”

  “Oh, super!” Her sigh of relief rattled in his ear. “Because I may be losing mine.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “That rat’s ass Debra is going to squeeze me out, I just know it,” she murmured. Debra was Julianne’s boss, the bane of her professional life.

  “Jul, don’t they say that you should never attribute to malice what you can blame on ignorance?”

  “This woman is both, Rob, I swear it. Dumb and mean together.”

  “You two get into this every few months,” Rob said reasonably. “A flurry of memos, and it’s all over until the next time. Don’t take it so personally,

  Jul. Look at Debra—she isn’t giving herself an ulcer about it.”

  “How do you know?” Julianne asked, her voice sharp with suspicion.

  “No, Jul, I can’t read her mind over the phone,” Rob said impatiently. “I’m using my common sense. If she was as hassled by you as you are by her, you would’ve been out on your ear months ago.”

  “Look, Rob, how busy are you? You have the van. Can you join me for lunch?”

  “Julianne, what do you have in mind?” Rob wished he really could probe her thinking over the phone.

  “The pizza place at 12:30, okay? Look, I’ve got to scoot. See you then.”

  Click! She hung up. Rob put his receiver back more slowly. What on earth did she have in mind? Suddenly it really worried him. How far could he reach these days? Julianne’s office was in Crystal City, a good 15 miles away.

  There were desks now, but still no chairs. Rob moved over to a far window where nobody was hammering partitions or tucking cables into baseboards. Across the sunny parking lot was their old office building. From here the only signs of the fire were the smears of black soot above the windows at the far end. A workman in an orange hard hat was sealing a broken window with black plastic and duct tape. Rob leaned against the window frame and closed his eyes.

  It was as if he stood on a high place, a rooftop or a mountain peak, with a view all around. As far as he could see down below were flowers, cup-shaped blossoms like buttercups or crocuses. There were hundreds of them, in every color imaginable, the fantasy of a gardener with megalomania. And when Rob leaned over to look more closely, he saw the flowers were heads, the heads of people. The tops of their skulls were transparent. He could make out the

  busy secret life inside each one, humming and spinning away, hidden from everyone but him.

  A little dizzy, he straightened up again and gulped. Either the mountain peak was growing, or he was going up, straight up towards the zenith. The horizon widened and widened, spreading out to show more flowers and yet more, millions of them. How many people could he encompass now—everyone in the greater Washington area? The state? The entire eastern seaboard? And he had more than a view. He had supreme power over these little flowers. He could tell them how to think, what to want, how to feel. He could force moralities and actions on them. He was omnipotent. Suddenly he couldn’t bear to contemplate it any more. With a shudder he wrenched himself away, back to the window overlooking the parking lot. He opened his eyes and wiped his wet forehead.

  “You don’t look so good, Bobster,” Danny said behind him. “Just this second, you’ve gone gray.”

  “The doctors said I’d be okay,” Rob said. “But maybe you’re right. I should take it easier. Go home and take a nap.”

  “Good idea,” Danny said. “Nothing’s going to get going here until all this housekeeping crap is set up. Next week we hit the ground running. You want to take a shot at sifting through rubble? You recognize the disks.”

  “Sure, Dan. Have Lori set aside a pair of work gloves for me.” Rob had to force a smile as he said that. Next week— what will I be, next week? At this rate I’m not even going to be human. He gathered up his jacket and briefcase with trembling hands, and almost ran out.

  Behind the wheel of the van he tried to relax. At least there’d be no problem now meeting Julianne for lunch. He arrived in good time at the Pizza Palace. It had been their favorite restaurant when they lived in Alexandria after the wedding. There was something enormously comforting in sitting up to a red-checked tablecloth in the familiar poky dining room. “Pepperoni, extra cheese, red peppers, and half anchovy,” he told the waitress. “And a small carafe of red.” It was the standard Lewis order.

  When Julianne came striding in she laughed at him.

  “How long has it been since we did this?” she asked, sliding into the booth across from him. “Do you remember when we ate here practically once a week?”

  “Those were the days,” Rob said. “B.C.—before children! Remember?” He leaned forward on his elbows, taking her hand.

  She sighed, smiling. She wasn’t thinking about pizza. Rob didn’t need telepathy to see that. He grinned back. There’s another idea, he thought.

  Use this thing in bed—it might be a lot of fun. What did sex do for women? How good was it for Jul, when she moaned and juddered in his arms? Inquiring minds want to know! Their love life was terrific, but you never knew. There might be room for improvement. Julianne’s face grew pinker, as if his ideas were contagious.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that they really were. He was so powerful now. And sitting so close to Julianne, thinking intently about something that she naturally shared with him— he was transmitting like a powerful radio tower, overriding her own weaker signal. It wasn’t her own desire glowing so deliciously in her hazel eyes, but just an echo of his own. The thought instantly pulled the plug on his lust. He let go of her hand.

  Luckily the wine and food arrived just then and he
could fill up her glass. Julianne shook her head, blinking. Damn, he was going to have to be more careful. “Tell me, uh, about Debra,” he said quickly. “What’s the big deal this time?”

  “Debra? Oh god, Rob, I wish I could strangle her. You know the report she had me draft for the Atlanta division? Four of the graphs—four of them!—turn up in her presentation this morning! On viewgraph slides, no less …”

  Rob chewed pizza and kept the glasses filled. Nodding and making an intelligent noise every now and then was enough to keep Julianne going until she had vented all her frustrations. Which was really the point of this entire exercise— there was nothing anybody could do about Debra’s alleged cussedness. It was as much a feature of Julianne’s job as wearing designer suits and pearls. Besides, Rob didn’t entirely believe in Debra’s demonic aspect. It might be like the ineffectiveness of the postal system, or the collapse of the American family—a nugget of truth bloated way out of proportion by overzealous newspapers and TV talk shows.

  At this moment overzealous was a good word for Julianne. She waved her pizza slice in the air. “—and when I checked with Mr. Thomas he said the fax had never been sent! Now wouldn’t you think that if she was going to be so devious she’d at least send a cover sheet, and then blame it on line noise?”

  “Oh sure, Jul, that would be obvious,” Rob agreed absently.

  “So my idea was to get you in on it,” Julianne continued.

  Rob choked on a sip of wine. “Me?”

  “Yeah—you could drive me back to the office after lunch, and come up for a few minutes. It shouldn’t take you but a Jiffy to tell Debra that I’m right. You can tell when she’s lying, right?”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “And then I’ll write a memo, an accurate memo, to send upstairs. And she’ll sign it.”

  “Jul, think a minute! How can I make the poor woman do something? It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “But you’re making her do something right. How is that different from making a bunch of dipsticks in Lorton do something right? Or pushing that shoe clerk around? You’re being really inconsistent!”