Divine

by Steven Grosso

  “You got that from the background check?” He clamped his foot down, broke from traffic and sped south past Walnut.

  “Of course. Whatda’ya think I’m making it up?” she said and pouted and looked away.

  “Don’t start with me now.”

  “Whatever.”

  And I wonder why couples shouldn’t be on the same unit? he thought. She wants to break my balls right now, in the middle of this fucking shit.

  “Can we just concentrate on this right now,” he said, not taking his eyes off the road.

  “I said whatever.”

  Steel wanted to punch through his windshield for the hell of it, feel the warm blood trickle down his fingers, fucking lick it, and then strangle Jimmy with his bare bloody hands afterwards. Fuck, shit! he thought.

  He kept driving, disregarding red stop signs and lights until he reached the offices of Fratt & Johnson in the heart of Rittenhouse Square. The hostage scene resembled something out of a movie. Uniformed officers directed traffic around Rittenhouse Square Park, waving their arms and blowing whistles. Bicyclers and Sunday shoppers who didn’t give a shit about the Eagles or the cold weather stood on their tippy-toes and pointed, talked on their cell phones and gossiped, hypnotized by what was going on inside the building. The officers pushed people back until the growing crowds retreated to the park and stood under enormous leafless trees. At least ten police cruisers, their lights flashing and flickering in and out, were turned on an angel in front of the tall gray office building, two officers by each car, arching their backs over the roofs and gripping their guns. The SWAT team, dressed in full black body armor, SWAT written across their backs, rifles pointed, lined the right side of the building entrance, ready to pile in and kick down doors. Even the bomb squad was there, and snipers paced the roof—all units were called in for major hostage situations.

  Steel shifted his car in park a block away, turned off the ignition, and he and Marisa leaped out. A bus pulled up to the corner beside them, popped open its doors, and electronically lowered its front steps for them to enter, but Steel waved off the driver. The man saluted back, and the doors snapped shut, released air and whistled like a steamboat. He glanced down at the tires rumbling over a manhole, clouds of steam rising from the holes in the rusty metal as the bus pulled away. He pivoted his feet and took off running for the building, Marisa just behind him. In the distance he heard a woman’s voice yell “Steel,” but he panted and sprinted into the cold wind smacking his face and drying out his eyes, each stinging as if someone were spraying Windex into his pupils. After noticing the reporter Jennifer Samson by her news van, who had called his name, he kept slapping his feet against the cold cement, ignored her, Marisa by his side, until they reached the building.

  Steel slowed down, his hands on his hips, huffing and puffing, catching his breath. He stood on his toes and swirled his head until he saw Lieutenant Williams nodding at him from in between swarms of various types of law enforcement agents. He circled his eyes across the strip of gray and tan office buildings of Rittenhouse and parked vehicles along the curb and retail stores and silver food carts that were closed for the weekend and finally at officers in place ready to fire off a shot at the slightest sign of Jimmy.

  His phone vibrated against his thigh. “Yeah.”

  “Detective, you made it. I’m looking at you and your ‘criminals with a badge’ now,” Jimmy said.

  “Jimmy, please let those innocent people go. They’re innocent. They didn’t have anything to do with this. They have families, kid—”

  Jimmy cut him off, breathed. “If you play by my rules, Steel, every single person will make it out of here alive.”

  “Whatever you want, Jimmy. You’re in charge. You’re the boss.”

  43

  S

  teel swept his eyes across Center City, once again over the tan and gray granite and glass buildings and a few brick ones and each arched and wrapped and hid and hovered over one another and cut through the sky, blocking the view of the sun peeking between dark gray clouds, the building’s roofs carving out the skyline. After flipping up his arm, he held his hand over his forehead like he was saluting someone and tilted it toward the tip of the twenty-or-so story building. He scanned each floor by following a strip of windows along its center until he got down to the eighth and noticed a row of yellow box-shaped glass stretching across the building’s façade, the office occupied and bright, the rest of the building’s windows dark with the shades drawn. Afterwards, he snapped his head back down and shifted it right and left at the officers still in position and ready to discharge their weapons on either side of him. Camera crews from the local stations taped video in the distance, setting up their equipment and waving their arms and debating with police on how close they were permitted to be to the action.

  Steel rubbed his face hard, clapped his hands together afterwards. The wind whipped by him but he wasn’t cold. The anger and fear and sweat exploding through his pores warmed his body—he could’ve been standing in the middle of a snowstorm in a bathing suit and wouldn’t have noticed the temperature—his focus on Jimmy and the innocent lives.

  He walked to the curb just in front of the building, at the tip of the army of officers, beyond the front lines, the man who had been designated the leader. He knew his hostage negotiations training would come in handy now. The skills he had learned would need to be used because Jimmy wanted to talk to him, wouldn’t settle for anyone else. Steel had talked a few people off the ledge since joining the force but never had to convince a man who had already killed out of taking others with him. He remembered discussing with the Marine’s psychiatrist and what he had told his own shrink about people who had attempted suicide but failed, and each one of the survivors had said the same thing, that right after they had leaped from a ledge or swallowed an entire pill bottle or discharged a weapon on themselves, they all regretted it the second it was too late, and all thought to themselves: “What the hell am I doing? These problems can be solved. I want to live.” Maybe he could convince Jimmy that he would be making a huge mistake, that he’d regret it as well.

  Before Steel arrived, Lieutenant Detective Williams had instructed all other officers that Steel would be taking the lead and they let him, didn’t put up a fight, who wanted the stress and responsibility.

  Steel paced back and forth, his shoe heels tapping against the pavement. Voices of onlookers were a whisper from the park because the officers had pushed them so far back. The wild wind rattled stop signs.

  Steel inhaled a full breath and reached in his pocket and dialed Jimmy back.

  “Detective, my pal,” Jimmy said.

  “Jimmy, we’ll give you whatever you want. Release them.”

  Jimmy whistled.

  Steel glanced up at the windows but didn’t see any people, just foggy light beams against the glass of Fratt & Johnson’s floor.

  “Detective, I told you that you’re playing by my rules.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, just tell me what you want,” Steel said, his voice low and soft, trying to sound calm and friendly.

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  “Why’s th—” Steel said and sharpened his tone, but softened it again, “why’s that, Jimmy? How don’t I understand? I do. You’re in charge. You’re the boss.”

  “I ask you the questions, tell you what to do!” he yelled. “I have the fucking power! You hear me, you understand me, Detective? You’re not shit without your badge!”

  Steel’s breathing picked up, air streaming in and out of his throat, the breaths like a tire pump at a gas station. But only because of the victims inside, not from fear itself, not from Jimmy. He knew Jimmy was deranged. Steel felt helpless, like he was failing the employees trapped inside with this maniac.

  Steel’s OCD picked up, the underlying anxiety cutting through, the intrusive thoughts telling him all those people would die because he failed, that everything was his responsibility, the world on his shoulders. He tapp
ed his hand against his waist in beats of four, the magic number, the compulsive urge to silence the obsessive thoughts. When his obsessive compulsive disorder hit, four was the antidote. He did everything while counting to four—checking the front door, washing his hands. And his symptoms accelerated during stressful times, when his brain chemicals were being drained rapidly from the synapses from overuse, leaving them empty and ripe for the condition to surface.

  “Look, Jimmy, you’re a far better, smarter and stronger man than me. You outsmarted me. You win.”

  “I’ll win. Oh, trust me, I’ll win.”

  Steel paused, remembered that a pause was a powerful tool to calm the person down, to let them release their anger. He paced, shoved his left hand in his pocket, and held the phone in the other. He sucked back air and slowed his anxiety but his racing heart kicked his chest like a stubborn kid kicking a wall during a temper tantrum.

  “All right, Detective. Here’s what I want from you.”

  “Anything, go ahead, Jimmy.”

  Steel heard a woman shriek, and the whine penetrated and hurt his eardrum. His scalp tingled as if ants crawled over it. “I just pulled this bitch’s hair because I could. Ha-ha!”

  Steel wished Jimmy was in front of him so he could knock out his front teeth with a straight jab. He swung a fist at the air. This motherfucker, Steel thought. “Just take it easy, Jimmy, and tell me what you want?”

  “I want you to answer a question for me. Seriously, put thought in it. I want you to truly think about it.”

  Steel froze in position, blinked, confused. “All right.”

  “I want you to tell me the meaning of life.”

  Steel glanced at the ground, up to Marisa, to Williams, back at the black-paved streets as a crumpled up piece of silky gray newspaper brushed by his shoes. “Ah, I think…Ah, give me a min—”

  The phone clicked off. Jimmy hung up.

  Steel checked that the call had ended. “Fuck. Shit. I lost him. Motherfucker.”

  44

  A

  bout a minute passed since Jimmy had hung up on Steel. Steel couldn’t hear or see anything externally, all the sights and sounds in his mind, in his thoughts, focusing on what he would say if Jimmy called back, wondering how the suspects inside were doing.

  His phone vibrated in his hand by his side.

  “Jimmy, can we talk and continue this conversation? You don’t have to hang up. I understand you’re frustrated, but I’m willing to talk.” Steel used another negotiation tactic—empathy—and assigned the word “frustrated” to Jimmy in hopes of making him feel better, to feel understood, and maybe let those people free.

  Jimmy shouted, “I make the rules, remember that, you hear me? I control you now! So, what’s your verdict? What’s the meaning of life? And it better be well thought out.”

  “Love,” Steel said and a wave of awkwardness washed over him. He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation, here, now, with a fucking murderer and man who didn’t have one benevolent cell left in his twisted brain.

  “You’re going to have to elaborate, Detective.”

  Steel tapped into a mixture of his own thoughts and information from hours of reading philosophy, self-help and spirituality books in his spare time. “I think, I mean, the meaning of life is loving others, to learn and experience love and accept it. The things Jesus and Buddha and other enlightened people spoke about. Think about it, Jimmy. We all have bodies and the physical world exists and satisfies those bodies, but the soul is inside us the entire time, through each phase of our lives, evolving, learning through experiences in a flawed existence on Earth with others, expanding our awareness as we age, as our intellect expands, as our emotions fight our soul, as our bodies, desires, and priorities change, as we lose and gain people and relationships in our lives. There’s something within us that allows us to choose love, to choose good or evil. Why would we even be able to feel love at all if it wasn’t essential to our existence on Earth, necessary for spiritual growth? If the world was pure evil, without love or any good, it would be destroyed or completely chaotic, no civility whatsoever. But love keeps life afloat, keeps humanity going, keeps some good around, even if things aren’t perfect.”

  Jimmy listened, waited for Steel to continue.

  Steel cleared his throat. “All right, let me try to explain that better. We have relationships with people and learn and grow so that we’ll realize that love is everything. And we learn through our experiences with other human beings, through different relationships we form throughout a lifetime. If you think about it, Jimmy, in my opinion, the world religions that teach compassion and love search for universal truths by raising our awareness that love is everything and that we’re all connected to something larger than ourselves. I think God is benevolent and wants us also to be benevolent. Take this for example. When a person falls in love, they feel euphoric. They’re more alive, connect to someone other than themselves, on a soul level. If we were to view life with that type of love, then our ego would fade, the search for our own adulation, fame, power, would vanish, our fear would go away because we’re content as is, in the moment, connected to the oneness of the world, in love with life. We wouldn’t want to harm the Earth or anything in it or spread negativity, but instead nurture life, develop it, grow it, inspire it, because it would inspire us. But when a person is going through sadness or is down and out, it pushes that person into fear. They feel despair and are desperate and hopelessness. Feel alone and disconnected from others and the world. Which feels right, Jimmy? Which feels better? Which makes sense? Connected or disconnected? Love or fear? Why else would we be here but to experience life from both spectrums, both the pains and joys, and to realize which side is better? Our soul goes through different ages and intellectual stages of awareness as human beings to understand love from different perspectives, and also through different types of relationships with others, as a child, spouse, parent, family member, friend, and so on. That’s all it boils down to…love. I feel God’s perfect, makes no mistakes, represents love. Take this for instance. The birth of a child is a joyous experience, and death is painful, and it’s because deep down behind our human bodies, behind our five senses and emotions—the ways we process life—the soul understands that life and love are better than pain and death, but our human experience is mortal and imperfect by nature and we must consciously recognize the soul in our flawed selves and act with goodness in mind every chance we get, through each opportunity life gives us, know that we’ll carry on in spirit after this life, that we’re just passing by, to be taught, our soul against our imperfect human mind and body . That’s how we connect to one another and God, by understanding that our soul is the closest thing we have to God, that we sense God communicating with us, call it conscience, gut feeling, intuition, whatever, through our actions, choices, thoughts, and how we treat each other. We have a choice to listen. That’s how we grow spiritually. God is always around us. From the trees so we could breathe. Gravity controlling the ocean’s waves. The sun that grows our food and keeps us warm. A teaching moment between a parent and child. A kind word or act from one person to another. The miracle of reproduction. The will of the human spirit to persevere and overcome adversity or obstacles in this life through personal growth and faith. We all get dealt challenges...and some are difficult and painful and sometimes unfair, but I think that’s the point of it all, to stay on God’s side. We have to treat every person as if they were God? So that’s it, I think, to connect to God by connecting to people on Earth, through love and relationships, how we choose to live our lives.” Steel coughed and thought so more. “I believe the soul outlives the body and has to experience evil and temptations on Earth and choose against it, even if we slip up and struggle at times. The material world will go on after we leave but our soul goes to a place of pure love. That’s what life is, I guess, Jimmy, a lesson for the soul. When I walk down a crowded street, I don’t see humans with souls, I see souls inside bodies, the body just a v
ehicle, a computer to process this reality, which carries our souls for the experiences on this existence in a physical form, to test our free will, to get a sense of a higher spiritual plane but still grounded on this one. We are the souls, we don’t have one. Every person in this world is a reflection of us if we were born or raised under their human circumstances, but our souls all long for similar things. Each of us is on a spiritual journey and given different obstacles. We’re all one and connected and our interactions with others spread out like a butterfly effect, weave together like a spider web and connect all of us—when we do good, good spreads—do bad, bad spreads. Sometimes, I believe, even bad things or tragedies that happen to us in our lives are for something greater than ourselves, even if we can’t see the meaning, if only God knows the answer. Our individual lives are an extension of God, a piece of consciousness in the eternal consciousness’ puzzle, and we’re all trying to get back to the main source…and that happens by learning through trials of this Earth, by connecting to people, but also from the good things, too. It’s why people who don’t have love in their lives are considered lonely and unhappy. We’re all longing to connect back with one another in love, to become one. Even when people do wrong things, sometimes they’re searching for love without knowing it, for the connection those bad things attract from others. They want to feel special and close to something. We all want to connect. Everybody wants to feel love, even you, Jimmy. That’s why you’re upset because you feel that no one loves or cares about you. Choose the good side, Jimmy. You still have time. Let those people go.”

  Jimmy listened, and Steel thought how he felt like a hypocrite because he couldn’t find one ounce of love for the fellow human being on the other end of the line.

  “Impressive, Detective, been watching Oprah?” He chuckled like the biggest wiseass in the world. “So, you think there’s a God, an afterlife? What are we going to do in heaven, play pick-up games of basketball, smile and fucking hug one another all day? What type of existence is that, to be happy all the time? What a boring fucking place! Let me ask you something. Why does God allow a nation’s leaders to slaughter its own citizens? Babies to die? Rape? Murder? Natural disasters? Why does God allow good people who follow the rules to be fucking fucked in the end? Where’s the fucking love lesson there? How about a good man who crosses the fucking street and gets hit by a car and dies? Three kids at home? Where’s your God at then? Life is fucking pointless, everything is fucked up. Has it ever occurred to you, Detective, that we are just the product of evolution, just a slightly smarter fucking animal, and when we die, that’s it, end of us, lights out? When our body shuts off, we’re gone, just like a computer…when you turn off the power, no more intelligence, no more consciousness. And what makes us so fucking smart? We’re nothing in the big scheme of the Universe. We’re animals. Just like lions fight and kill each other for territory, so do we. The difference is, we’re a little smarter….lions fight for space in the wild, we fight for countries. What if we as humans are not as special as we make ourselves out to be? What if we’re viewed by a superior species the same way we view flies or roaches. We don’t think they’re special or go somewhere after we swat at them or stomp on them with our shoes. Why are we so fucking special? We’re not.”