“I am going to approach the Ark. I wish Gabriela could be up here to do this.” Brandon took six slow strides toward it. The lights overhead came on, bathing him in brilliance. He smiled and nodded at the camera. See how wonderful I am, his bearing and expression said.
He reached out to take the lid off the Ark. Eric had always thought the stares of the cherubim were directed outward, far past anything merely human. But when the TV camera focused on the Ark, those golden eyes seemed to be aimed at the spot where Brandon’s hand was going. Eric shook his head. He knew enough about camera angles to know how unreliable they could be.
Brandon touched the lid.
His mouth opened. He was going to say something—Eric was sure of that. Instead, the broadcaster looked surprised. His eyes rolled up and he crumpled to the floor in front of the Ark.
“Give me a fucking break!” Eric yelled. “You bum!”
Brandon’s eyes were set and staring. “He’s…not blinking,” Orly said. A moment later, she added, “I don’t think he’s breathing.”
Eric also didn’t think Brandon’s chest rose. That wasn’t what made him stop jeering. A large wet stain spread across the broadcaster’s crotch. If you suddenly dropped dead, your bladder’d let go. Someone faking it wouldn’t pay that much attention to detail, would he? No way. Not on worldwide TV. You’d never get anybody to take you even halfway seriously after pretending to piss yourself in front of millions of people.
“I don’t think he’s going to get up,” Orly said.
“Either that’s the best-timed coronary or stroke in history, or…” Eric’s voice trailed off. He and Orly looked at each other. He didn’t know what the hair on the back of her neck was doing, but he knew about his. If he were a cat or dog, his tail would have puffed out, too.
The TV cut to a wide shot. Kupferman was staring at Brandon’s body. His mouth moved soundlessly.
“What was that?” Eric asked. “I can’t read lips in Hebrew.”
“I think he said, I tried to tell him,” Orly said.
A cameraman in jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt knelt by Brandon. He fumbled for a pulse, than bent over the broadcaster and started CPR. An Israeli guard rushed into the picture. “Want help?” he asked in Hebrew, then in English.
“Yeah. Spell me when I get tired,” the cameraman said. “If we can keep him going till he gets to a hospital—”
“If there’s anything to keep going,” the guard said. But he traded with the cameraman. They crouched only a couple of feet from the Ark—and made sure not to bump into it.
Somebody shouted into a telephone for an ambulance. Sirens outside the Shrine of the Book said one got there a minute later. Paramedics ran in. One tried to start an IV on Brandon. Another used a defibrillator. Brandon jerked at the charge, but that was it. Eric suspected he needed something stronger than human intervention: something like what Lazarus got.
The paramedics wouldn’t quit. They put Brandon on a stretcher and carried him out. The siren wailed again, then dopplered away.
The cameraman, the guard, and Shlomo Kupferman looked out at the camera. There floated the Ark of the Covenant. Nobody would open it tonight, no matter how many millions watched. “ ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,’ ” Rabbi Kupferman said in English. “ ‘Blessed be His glorious kingdom for ever and ever’ ”—both lines of the Shma. He nodded to his audience. “This show is over. A man did what he thought he could, and the Lord willed that he pay for his folly. Is that not more important than anything else you might have learned? Good night.”
Somebody behind the scenes pulled the plug. The TV in Eric and Orly’s apartment went dark. After a few seconds, a news feed from a hospital ER came on. Brandon Nesbitt was dead on arrival. “Good night!” Eric said.
“Good God!” Orly echoed.
* * *
—
“I am going to approach the Ark. I wish Gabriela could be up here to do this,” Brandon said.
Chaim Avigad yawned. He’d had some cappuccino, but he was still sleepy. So were the other ritually pure boys who shared the tent with him. Nobody slept, though. How could you miss this? The Ark! Counting Rosie, there’d been ten red heifers, but only one Ark. Seeing it gleam, Chaim could understand why, too. All that gold! And it wasn’t just fancy. It was holy.
“You think Moses’ tablets are in there?” a boy asked.
“You think God will let an American goy open the Ark and find out?” another said.
Brandon touched the Ark’s lid where the cherubim were looking. Before you could blink, the broadcaster lay on the floor of the Heikhal Ha-Sefer.
“Fake!” two kids shouted. “So fake!” one added.
But Brandon lay there. Chaim stopped thinking it was a fake when he saw the American had wet his pants. Some things you wouldn’t do, even on TV. Another boy made gross-out noises when he saw the same thing.
“He’s dead,” Chaim said.
“No way,” someone came back.
“Way,” Chaim insisted. “Look. He touched it, and he keeled over.”
“It’s phony. He’ll get up,” the other boy said.
But he didn’t. A guy in ordinary clothes and a guard worked on him. Paramedics came in and worked on him, too. They carted him off like a sack of fertilizer. Then word came that he’d died.
By that time, Chaim wasn’t sleepy. “God killed him,” he said, wonder and fear in his voice. None of the other boys argued. They stared at the TV.
Chaim’s glance strayed toward the barn where Rosie, Shoshanah, slept. If what the Bible said about the Ark was true, what it said about the red heifer was probably true, too. God did want people to sacrifice one to make things ritually pure. The only one in the world was over there.
How could you get around that? Did you dare think about trying? Chaim…dared.
* * *
—
“I am going to approach the Ark. I wish Gabriela could be up here to do this,” Brandon said.
Lester Stark did not admire Brandon Nesbitt the man. He wished anyone but Brandon were covering this fast-changing story. Brandon wasn’t just secular. Stark knew secular men he respected, men who believed what they believed for reasons they found good but recognized others might think differently. To Brandon, religion was hooey; he made scant effort to hide his opinion.
But Brandon the broadcaster was a pro’s pro. A pro himself, Stark admired the control Brandon had over his audience, even when he’d had to do this at the last minute. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. He made you want, need, to know what happened next. Being able to do that was a gift.
He touched the Ark. Stark leaned forward in his chair. He wanted to know what lay inside. Did God write those tablets, or did Moses? Either way, seeing them…
“Oh, my God!” Rhonda gasped as Brandon toppled.
For a moment, Stark thought Brandon, the mocking secular man, would bounce up and laugh at the yokels who’d believed something had happened to him. That was his style. But then the minister realized the laugh was on Brandon. He lay too still, too limp….
“Oh, my God,” Lester said, more softly than his wife had.
He watched them try to revive Brandon till the camera, fearing to show real death on American television, cut away. He watched the report from the hospital announcing that Brandon hadn’t made it.
In the moment of Brandon’s greatest triumph, the last moment of his life, Stark had thought of him as a pro’s pro. That only proved he didn’t always know what he was talking about. And it proved one other thing: when you talked about pros’ pros, Shlomo Kupferman went at the top of the list.
“What happens now?” Rhonda asked.
Stark always had been an honest man. “Sweetheart,” he answered, “I have no idea.”
* * *
—
“I am going to app
roach the Ark. I wish Gabriela could be up here to do this,” Brandon Nesbitt said.
Jamal Ashrawi watched an Al Jazeera feed, with an Arabic translation of the American reporter’s words at the bottom of the screen. The Grand Mufti spoke some English, but was glad to have the crawl.
Unlike the late Haji Ibrahim, he’d made it down to Hebron. If the Israelis wanted him, they’d have to start a war to get him. Both Hamas and Fatah had promised. Truly God was great! Getting the militias to agree on anything these days was harder than getting either to agree with the Zionists. The fighters with whom Haji Jamal watched were Hamas men, with green armbands and head scarves.
They hooted when Brandon fell over. So did he. How could you help it? That was an obvious trick, to make the Jews’ religion look true. Brandon was no Jew, but so what? Christians were full of error, too.
Some fighters went on jeering as a couple of people ran out to work on the newsman. But one said, “God smite me if they aren’t giving him CPR. I’ve done it. You have to push hard enough to break ribs, and they are. You can tell.”
“What?” Ashrawi said. “Do you think God struck him dead for his presumption?”
“I don’t know,” the fighter answered. Since he had an AK on his lap, the Grand Mufti didn’t push.
Paramedics rushed in. They worked on Brandon, too. As they put him on a stretcher and carried him out, another guard muttered, “Truly there is no God but God.”
“And God is great,” still another whispered.
“Yes, there is no God but God, and He is Great, and He is the God of Islam,” Jamal Ashrawi said. “God does not heed the Jews—they rejected His Prophet, peace be upon him.”
“Can you say God didn’t strike down that Christian?” asked the guard with the rifle on his lap.
“We don’t know he’s dead,” Ashrawi said. “This could be a trick to make us doubt. Do you want to fall into the trap the Jews set for you?”
Two guards shook their heads. Most kept watching the TV. Before long, a woman standing in front of a hospital with her hair uncovered announced that Brandon Nesbitt had died. The guards looked reproachfully at Jamal Ashrawi.
He didn’t know what to say. Brandon was prominent in the West. Taking him off the air wouldn’t be easy, not when he’d been a fixture for years. Was he dead? Had he touched the Jews’ Ark and died, the way the rabbi warned he might? If not, what did happen? Jamal Ashrawi had answers to none of those questions. That worried him.
* * *
—
Eric bounced from the Israeli channel to CNN to MSNBC to Fox to ABC and CBS and NBC. Talking heads pontificated—a hell of a word, under the circumstances—about what had happened to Brandon and what it meant. The short answer was, nobody knew. The long answer was…on all the networks.
Orly grabbed the remote. The TV went dark. “Why’d you do that?” Eric yelped.
“Because they aren’t saying what’s got to be true,” she answered.
“Which is?”
“It was what it looked like. God killed him.”
“But that’s—” Eric stopped. He could believe God had punched Brandon’s ticket. Or he could believe Brandon had had a heart attack or a stroke, just by coincidence, when his manicured paw came down on the Ark with secular intent. This when Brandon seemed in excellent shape and hadn’t come close to hitting forty yet.
Which was more unlikely? Eric wasn’t sure—or, if he was, he didn’t want to face it.
Which was scarier? He knew damn well.
“I don’t want to be frum,” he remarked to nobody in particular.
“Tell me about it!” Orly exclaimed. “Who in her right mind would?”
Eric went into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle of nasty local brandy and two glasses. He poured one for himself, then raised an eyebrow. Orly nodded. He gave her a slug and raised his glass. “L’chaim,” he said, much less ironically than he’d intended.
“L’chaim,” she echoed. They both drank. After what they’d watched, to life seemed the only possible toast.
The brandy exploded in Eric’s stomach. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d knocked one back before sunup—which was bound to be just as well. The room swayed when he stood again. He eyed the bottle as if eyeing a rattler.
Orly was doing the same thing. She’d drained her glass in a hurry, too. “Want another one?” she asked.
Another one would lead to another one would lead to…Retro me, Satanas, Eric thought. He shook his head. “Better not,” he said. But the brandy gave him a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous coincidence. Against the wrath of God, on worldwide TV? He could hope. “Let’s get breakfast. I want something greasy in there to take the edge off the paint thinner.”
“You’re supposed to do that before you start drinking,” Orly said. But she shed the T-shirt and sweats she’d slept in and put on a bra and a different T-shirt and some jeans. Eric dressed, too. He brushed his teeth—cheap brandy and Colgate didn’t mix—and ran a comb through the hair he had left.
They got a big bowl of hummus at the falafel place around the corner. It was fancied up with olive oil and fuul beans, and came with pitas. It wasn’t an American-style breakfast but, with more strong coffee, it was good.
Maybe it was the brandy, maybe it was the fresh coffee, maybe even the hummus, but Eric was starting to feel human—in a rattled way—when somebody said, “Hello,” in English.
He looked up. Damned if Barbara Taylor wasn’t standing there like a lost puppy. “Hi, Barb,” he said, more cheerfully than he felt. “Grab a chair and join us?”
“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” Barb must have lived clean—well, of course she did—because somebody at the next table got up. She snagged his chair. Orly made a mutinous noise deep in her throat. She wasn’t fond of Barb’s relentless naïveté.
But what could you do? Eric did what he could—he waved for more breakfast fixings. “What kind of coffee you want?” he asked Barb.
“Nes is fine,” she answered. Nes was instant. In a country where there was so much good coffee around, drinking that shit seemed like sacrilege to Eric. They weren’t his taste buds, so he got what Barb wanted. Orly made a soft noise. It wasn’t quite yuck!, but it came close.
“So how are you?” Eric asked Barb.
“I’ll tell you—I’m kind of upset,” she said. “Did you folks watch the show about the Ark?”
“ ’Fraid so,” Eric said. Orly nodded. She might have liked to deny it, but she couldn’t.
“Me, too.” Barb paused; a waiter plopped more hummus and a cup of Nes in front of her. Israeli waiters were long on attitude and short on style points, especially in a joint like this. She sipped the coffee, nodded, and started to eat. “That poor man,” she said.
“Brandon?” Eric had all he could do not to choke on a chunk of pita. He’d called Brandon a lot of things himself, most of them unprintable. None was so polite as That poor man. Barb was too nice for her own good.
“He got what was coming to him,” Orly said.
Barb shook her head. “Terrible to die for being curious.”
“For being nosy,” Orly said.
There, Eric agreed. “For being nosy and going after ratings,” he said. “If the Ark wouldn’t draw a bunch of”—he swallowed fundies at the last moment, because Barb was one—“uh, people, he wouldn’t have cared about it.” Was Barb a good influence? There was a scary thought.
She stopped eating to say, “Heavens to Betsy, I know that.” Eric realized he would have done better to order her something more familiar. But she was damaging the bowl of smashed-up garbanzos. She went on, “Going after ratings is his job.”
“Was,” Orly said.
“That’s about it,” Eric agreed. “The Big Producer in the Sky called him to take his last meeting.” If he stayed flip about it, he wouldn’t hav
e to admit how much it terrified him.
“If God did slay him, isn’t it a sign the Last Days are coming?” Barb made what should have been an inflammatory question sound reasonable. Or maybe what seemed to be reason sprang from watching a healthy man keel over for no visible reason.
“Whose Last Days?” Orly snarled. The Christian, Jewish, and Muslim versions looked, as computer geeks said, incompatible.
Barb only smiled. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Exciting to live in times like these, isn’t it? Maybe we’ll find out.”
“Oh, boy,” Eric said. Barb seemed to think getting caught up in any of the versions out there would be good and exciting. Eric was sure it would be exciting. Good? Not so much. “I’d sooner stick to business as usual.”
“Oh, gosh, so would I,” she answered. “But it’s not what we want, is it? It’s what God wants.”
“How do you know what God wants?” Orly kept throwing darts.
“I read the Scriptures and pray a lot,” Barb said. If the darts stung, she gave no sign.
“How about thinking?” Eric asked.
“That, too,” Barb agreed. “We’ve got a lot to think about, don’t we? The red heifer and the bomb and the Ark and poor Brandon Nesbitt and the new Temple and—”
“Enough, already!” Eric said.
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.” Orly sounded as if she hoped like hell it didn’t. Eric clung to the same hope just as hard.
Barb Taylor only smiled. “Well, sure, maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “But wouldn’t it be neat if it did?”
“No!” Orly and Eric said together.
Barb wasn’t listening to them. Her voice went soft and dreamy: “To see the Lord face-to-face…”
“Brandon did,” Eric said. “Look what it got him.”
“This would be different.” You couldn’t faze Barb. She saw the world through rose-colored glasses whether the world deserved it or not. “Jesus is supposed to be a lot more merciful than His Father.” Then she added, “Heaven knows we need mercy.”
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