Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  It was an interesting 5.73 miles—especially the last .73 miles or so, as they climbed to the top of a rise that had, judging from bullet-tattered signs, been a county park at one point. More recently it had become one of those cult sites where people put up crosses, bundled them in fuel-soaked rags, and burned them at night.

  Or so Sophia had been telling herself for most of the day, ever since she had spied a row of these things on the far side of the Missouri. Even then, a skeptical voice in the back of her mind had told her that the hypothesis didn’t totally add up. But she’d been too preoccupied with breaking events to pay much attention.

  As they came out of a stand of big oaks and maples and broke out into windswept prairie near the brow of the hill, she saw the truth, which was that people had actually been nailed to those crosses and left to die. The lumpy silhouettes she’d seen against the western sky were what remained of those people after bugs, birds, and bacteria had been at them for a while. Bones and synthetic clothing held up pretty well; cotton blue jeans rotted but spandex underwear lasted forever.

  Something like a dozen of these things were spaced at intervals along the road as it wound up to the top of the hill. Sophia went into shock after the first one and didn’t return to full awareness until they were pulling into the broken asphalt parking lot at the scenic overlook that topped the hill. Three crosses had been erected here in what was either a meaningless coincidence or a shout-out to the biblical Calvary. Loose bones and skulls were strewn about, commingled with empty beer cans and shell casings. Evidently these crosses were of special significance and so there was a waiting list or something. They were not single-use; space occasionally had to be made for new occupants. All three looked to have been built at the same time (maybe a year or two ago?) by the same work crew. They’d used sturdy glulam beams and joined them at the literal crux with galvanized nail-on brackets, just like framing a suburban home. The one in the middle, and the one to its right, had been occupied for a while and there was not much left of the people who’d been nailed up. They were both men. One was dressed in a black polyester suit that had stood up well to the elements. Nailed to his right hand was a Bible. A clerical collar dangled from one lapel, fluttering in the wind. The corpse to his right was in a formerly white shirt. To his hand was nailed a Book of Mormon.

  The third cross was occupied by a living human. As Sophia got out of the SUV and looked up at him, she experienced a moment of déjà vu. Earlier, Joseph’s crew had sent Pete a video of this guy as proof that he was still alive. Shot from below, it had put Sophia in mind of a picture she’d seen in an art history class. Now, standing in the same place, finally she was able to place it: Lamentation of Christ, a study in perspective and foreshortening by an Italian Renaissance painter.

  The victim watched curiously as Pete’s men went to work removing the ladders from the SUV’s roof rack.

  No one had spoken to him yet. Pete was busy texting a sitrep to Uncle Jake. Sophia said, “Hello. Jake sent us. We have worked out a deal to take you out of here.”

  The victim’s breathing was ragged and laborious. He contracted his arms, pulling himself up a few inches, and expanded his chest enough to croak out: “The ladder. Under my feet please.”

  “He wants something under his feet!” Sophia exclaimed to the guys who were taking the ladders down. The victim’s feet were at about the altitude of her face and she forced herself to look at them, expecting the worst, but they hadn’t been nailed, they were just dangling. The men slammed a ladder against the vertical and then raised it up from beneath until the victim could get his feet on it. He then stood up and took a deep breath and let out a great sigh of relief.

  “Initiate Nail Removal Immediately,” he said. “Sorry. Old joke.”

  “On it!” said Cousin Eric, exhibiting a brand-new crowbar, painted bright yellow and encrusted with safety warnings and legal explication.

  “There are all these details and nuances connected with crucifixion that I suppose no one knows about anymore, until they reinstate the practice and relearn how it works. It turns out that it’s asphyxiation that kills you,” said the victim.

  “Is that right!? You don’t say!” Pete remarked, seeming genuinely fascinated.

  “I do say,” the victim returned. He had some hard-to-place accent in which “say” came out like “sigh.” “So if they nail your feet, you actually die slower.”

  “Because you have something to push off against?” Sophia guessed.

  “Top marks,” said the victim. “You’re the one who’s at Princeton. Jake talks about you.”

  “And they didn’t nail your feet because they wanted—” Pete continued.

  “To go easy on me, I guess. Quick death by asphyxiation. Either that, or they ran out of nails.”

  Attention turned, for a while, to the nitty-gritty details of de-crucifying this employee of Jake’s. The cross had been socketed into an aboveground framework bolted together with slotted angle irons, rising to about midthigh on Sophia. Only gravity was holding it there, and so they decided to get all hands around it and lift it straight out. Then they set it down on the parking lot, still vertical, and Sophia braced the butt of it with her foot while the guys walked it down. The victim was now supine, breathing much easier. Sophia walked up to that end of the cross and squatted down next to him as the men hemmed and hawed about how to remove the nails without the crowbar’s crushing his wrists. For the nails had been driven not through his palms but through the complex of bones where the forearm joined the hand.

  “If you have a hacksaw or better yet something like an abrasive cutoff wheel you could simply remove the heads from the nails. Then I could lift my arms right off. My name is Enoch. You’d be Sophia. I’d shake your hand but—”

  “Maybe later,” Sophia said. “What is that nailed to yours? Doesn’t look like a Bible.”

  “Oh, it could be almost any book,” Enoch said dismissively. “I didn’t have one on me—unusual for a missionary, and confusing to them—so they took one at random from the library of that school.”

  “It’s The Boys’ First Book of Radio and Electronics by Alfred Morgan,” Sophia said.

  “Oh, that’s a good one!” he said. He turned his head to look at his left wrist. “You see what I mean?” he said to Eric. “They had a disagreement as to the correct pressure setting on the air compressor.”

  “They used a nail gun?” Pete said incredulously. “Lazy.”

  “Of course they did! It’s very laborious hand-driving a sixteen-penny nail into glulam. They like guns. Tap, tap. Done. My point being that if the setting is too high, the nail goes all the way through, which spoils it. You’ll note that—experienced crucifixionists that they are—they dialed it back so that it only went in part of the way. Plenty of leeway there for you to get a hacksaw under the head.”

  An hour later they were back across the bridge in Sioux City. Sophia had been envisioning a helicopter ambulance or something, but the fact of the matter was that Enoch wasn’t that badly hurt. Each wrist, of course, had a puncture wound all the way through, but apparently the nails found a way between the little bones and so it was all soft tissue damage. The swelling looked dreadful and had turned both hands into stiff purple mittens—when they gave him a bottle of Dasani, he had to trap it between his palms, like a bear—but there simply wasn’t a lot to do medically. Jake had arranged for doctors to be there, and they took him to the local trauma center just for the sake of form. But, other than the wrists, he was fine.

  “Where next?” Enoch asked Sophia as they sat in a waiting room in the X-ray unit. “Oh, Jake mentioned you were on a cross-country trip. Which come to think of it would be fairly obvious even if he hadn’t mentioned it.”

  “Uh, well, before all this happened, we were just going to keep driving west. South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming . . .”

  “I don’t suppose I could talk you into making a little southerly detour?” Enoch asked. “To Moab.” He shrugged. “Business there.”


  The detour would add a couple of days to the journey. They raised, then eventually dismissed, the obvious questions: Couldn’t Jake just get Enoch a plane ticket? Or, come to think of it, a whole plane? Why was Enoch now their problem? What kind of weird stuff had he been up to among the Ameristanis, and would he turn out to be an insufferable weirdo during the two days they’d have to spend in the car with him?

  They went out for coffee. While they stood in line at Starbucks, Phil asked Enoch point-blank: “What are you? Not just some regular Joe, apparently.”

  Sophia gave him side-eye. Enoch noticed that and raised his eyebrows in an amused way. “It’s perfectly all right!” he assured her. “One so rarely gets a direct question.” Then, to Phil, he said, “As far as I can make out, I am an emissary of sorts from another plane of existence.”

  They all had a laugh.

  “Tell us about this other plane, it sounds fascinating!” said Anne-Solenne, totally buying into the joke.

  “The problem is, I can’t seem to remember it very well.”

  “Aww!”

  “Oh, don’t pout! It’s not my fault. This plane is made of different stuff, organized in a different way, and so none of my memories transfer over directly.”

  “Like when you have to convert code from Python to C++,” Julian suggested, getting into the spirit of it.

  “You would know better than I, Julian,” Enoch said, “but the upshot is that the best I can really manage is to try to help sort things out as best I can on this plane. Oh, I’ll have a grande flat white, whole milk please—I like to live dangerously.” Then he looked down at his hands, which were mummified in ice packs. “And a straw.”

  Having determined that he wasn’t a total weirdo—or at least the wrong sort of total weirdo—they said yes to the idea of giving him a ride, on the general principle that this was meant to be a freewheeling coast-to-coast adventure, and as such it seemed like incorrect form to say no to this reasonably amiable chap who had, only a few hours ago, been nail-gunned to a glulam cross. So they piled into the car—which was now a bit crowded—and laid in a course for Moab. Which ought to have been as simple as laying in a course for any other place. But a little warning did come up on Sophia’s UI, letting her know that the existence of Moab was in question. Opinions differed as to whether it had been burned off the surface of the world by a nuclear blast twelve years ago.

  This peeved Sophia to no end, and so once she had slapped the warning out of the air and confirmed the destination, she took the unusual step of making a voice connection to her editor, Janine. Janine worked out of Orcas Island in Puget Sound and was a junior assistant to Lisa, who was the editor of Sophia’s mother, Zula. That was for a reason. If you had a good relationship with an editor, you wanted to stick with them your whole life, and Lisa was of an age that she would probably retire while Sophia was in her thirties. Janine, on the other hand, was only a couple of years older than Sophia. “How was Nebraska?” was how she opened the conversation.

  “Super weird. But I was just calling to report an anomaly.”

  “I’m all ears!” Janine said. “Let me rewind your feed so I have it before me . . .”

  “Okay, let me know when you—”

  “Oh, whoa!”

  “See it?”

  “Yeah! Holy crap, how did that get in there?”

  “My theory is . . .”

  “Because of where you’ve been the last couple of days, the people you’ve shown interest in . . .”

  “The Leviticans . . . maybe even some of the Forthrasts, who knows . . .”

  “. . . some algo got the wrong idea about you.”

  “It’s easy to forget,” Sophia remarked, “that there are millions of people who really don’t believe that Moab still exists. But when you’re here, you see the REMEMBER MOAB stickers all over the place.”

  “It’s pervasive—super sticky—somehow it sneaked into your feed. Crazy!” Janine said, in a somewhat distracted tone suggesting that, while she held up her end of the conversation, she was swimming through clouds of visualized data.

  “I just thought that it was so funny,” Sophia said, “given that—”

  “You know Corvallis and Maeve personally, they are family!”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, this is super-useful feedback!” Janine said. “And I am so glad you took the trouble to bring it to my notice.”

  “I knew you’d feel that way,” Sophia said.

  “I’ll do some diagnostics and let you know if I see any more of this kind of material trying to creep into your feed.”

  “Great!”

  “And I took the liberty of shutting off Family Reunion Mode.”

  “Oh, thanks. I totally forgot.”

  “I figured those crucifixion geeks didn’t need to know everything about you.”

  “Good point. Well played. Thanks again.”

  “Have a great drive to Moab! Thunderstorms ahead—will alert you!”

  “Thanks!”

  “Bye!”

  “Bye.”

  “What were you doing among those people?” Phil demanded to know when enough time had passed that he felt he could address Enoch in his usual blunt, familiar style.

  Enoch, hands bundled in ice packs to hold down the swelling, was seated in the middle of the backseat for the simple reason that he could not operate the car’s door handles or seat belts and so required help from flankers.

  “You’re a missionary?” Phil demanded. He was in the driver’s seat at the moment, and even though he wasn’t actually driving, this seemed to confer on him a certain driverly authority.

  “Oh, I don’t think that missionary-style activity would work very well on those people,” Enoch returned.

  To the others this might have sounded like informed speculation, but to Sophia, who, earlier today, had seen the remains of two actual missionaries nailed to crosses, it came off as just about the driest possible witticism. Seated to Enoch’s left, she face-checked him just to see if he was fucking with her. But he couldn’t have been more unreadable. He had a red beard on a face with some history, and gray hair swept back from his forehead. “If you’re going to try to get people to change the way they think, you have to offer some kind of value proposition, and that’s hard with these people.”

  “Why these people in particular?”

  “Well, you know, let’s say, for example, you’re trying to sell a tribe of Bronze Age shepherds on monotheism . . . you begin with, ‘Okay, chaps, there’s lots of different gods, but if you go all in with this one particular god, you’re signing on to a winning squad, you’re going to defeat the other tribes and control more grazing land.’ Which works, because they have an orderly sheep-based economy in which the rules of the game are clear and everyone can agree on basic ideas such as ‘If our animals eat more grass we have a better time of it.’ But those people, the people across the river, are in a very unsettled state and nothing really makes sense to them, and so trying to get them to buy into a coherent worldview of any sort is a mug’s game.”

  Julian translated: “Bronze Age shepherds may have been just one step above cavemen, but at least they were reality based.”

  “Very much so,” Enoch agreed. “And that goes on being more or less true for quite a while. Now, theater, and later movies, eventually get us into the realm of shared hallucinations. But those are neatly boxed in both space and time, and there’s a bit of ceremony to them. You buy the ticket, you enter the theater, you sit down, the lights dim, everyone in the place shares the same hallucination at the same time, lights come back up, it’s over, you go outside. Even old-school TV had some of that.”

  “The TV was this big piece of furniture in the living room,” said Anne-Solenne, getting into it. “You sat down at eight P.M. to watch I Love Lucy or whatever.”

  “Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed,” Enoch said, “and enabled each individua
l person to live twenty-four/seven in their own personalized hallucination stream. And if you are still tied to reality by family or by some kind of regularizing influence in your day-to-day life, like having a job, then you’ve got a fighting chance. But those people—” Since it was awkward to gesture using ice-packed mitts, he pointed out the side window with his chin. “My goodness. Religion as such—as it has existed and flourished for thousands of years—doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “Why doesn’t it stand a chance?” Sophia asked. “Can you elaborate? Remember, my friends didn’t see . . . what I saw.”

  “Well, most religions add a supernatural overlay, something fantastical and imaginative, to the physical reality that everyone sees. Everyone sees the lightning bolt; religion adds the Zeus, standing on a mountain and hurling it. And if you are a Bronze Age shepherd of low to middling intellect and little imagination, well, that is a mind blower right there—the charismatic priest who can tell you that story with panache is really onto something, career-wise. Mutatis mutandis, same goes for other religions. They had a monopoly on the fantastical. Science fiction and fantasy combined with a revenue model.”