The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories
Page 78
“Yes,” Mel said, getting angry all over again. “You know. A burning bush, a pillar of fire, a star. A sign.”
He must have been shouting. The waitress came scurrying over with the check. “Are you through with this?” she said, looking at the plates of half-eaten food.
“Yes,” Mel said. “We’re through.”
“You can pay at the register,” the waitress said, and scurried away with their plates.
“Look,” B.T. said, “the brain’s a very complicated thing. An alteration in brain chemistry—are you on any medications? Sometimes medications can cause people to hear voices or—”
Mel picked up the check and stood, reaching for his wallet. “It wasn’t a voice.”
He put down money for a tip and went over to the cash register.
“You said it was a strong feeling,” B.T. said after Mel had paid. “Sometimes endorphins can—nothing like this has ever happened to you before, has it?”
Mel walked out into the lobby. “Yes,” he said, and turned to face B.T. “It happened once before.”
“When?” B.T. said, his face gray again.
“When I was nineteen. I was in college, studying pre-law. I went to church with a girlfriend, and the minister gave a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon on the evils of dancing and associating with anyone who did. He said Jesus said it was wrong to associate with nonbelievers, that they would corrupt and contaminate you. Jesus, who spent all His time with lowlifes, tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers! And all of a sudden I had this overwhelming feeling, this—”
“Epiphany,” B.T. said.
“That I had to do something, that I had to fight him and all the other ministers like him. I stood up and walked out in the middle of the sermon,” Mel said, remembering, “and went home and applied to seminary.”
B.T. rubbed his hand across his mouth. “And the epiphany you had yesterday was the same as that one?”
“Yes.”
“Reverend Abrams?” a woman’s voice said.
Mel turned. The short plump woman who’d been on the phone and at the motel the night before was hurrying toward them, lugging her bright green tote bag.
“Who’s that?” B.T. said.
Mel shook his head, wondering how she knew his name.
She came up to them. “Oh, Reverend Abrams,” she said breathlessly, “I wanted to thank you—I’m Cassie Hunter, by the way.” She stuck out a plump, beringed hand.
“How do you do?” Mel said, shaking it. “This is Dr. Bernard Thomas, and I’m Mel Abrams.”
She nodded. “I heard the desk clerk say your name. I didn’t thank you the other night for saving my life.”
“Saving your life?” B.T. said, looking at Mel.
“There was this awful whiteout,” Cassie said. “You couldn’t see the road at all, and if it hadn’t been for the taillights on Reverend Abrams’s car, I’d have ended up in a ditch.”
Mel shook his head. “You shouldn’t thank me. You should thank the driver of the carnival truck 1 was following. He saved both of us.”
“I saw those carnival trucks,” Cassie said. “I wondered what a carnival was doing in Iowa in the middle of winter.” She laughed, a bright, chirpy laugh. “Of course, you’re probably wondering what a retired English teacher is doing in Iowa in the middle of winter. Of course, for that matter, what are you doing in Iowa in the middle of winter?”
“We’re on our way to a religious meeting,” B.T. said before Mel could answer.
“Really? I’ve been visiting famous writers’ birthplaces,” she said. “Everyone back home thinks I’m crazy; but except for the last few days, the weather’s been fine. Oh, and I wanted to tell you, I just talked to the clerk, and she thinks the phones will be working again by tomorrow morning, so you should be able to make your call.”
She rummaged in her voluminous tote bag and came up with a roomkey folder. “Well, anyway, I just wanted to thank you. It was nice meeting you,” she said to B.T, and bustled off across the lobby toward the coffee shop.
“Who were you trying to call?” B.T. asked.
“You,” Mel said bitterly. “I realized I owed it to you to tell you, even if you did think 1 was crazy.”
B.T. didn’t say anything.
“That is what you think, isn’t it?” Mel said. “Why don’t you just say it? You think I’m crazy.”
“All right. I think you’re crazy,” B.T. said, and then continued angrily, “Well, what do you expect me to say? You take off in the middle of a blizzard, you don’t tell anyone where you’re going, because you saw the Second Coming in a vision?”
“It wasn’t—”
“Oh, right. It wasn’t a vision. You had an epiphany. So did the woman in The Globe last week who saw the Virgin Mary on her refrigerator. So did the Heaven’s Gate people. Are you telling me they’re not crazy?”
“No,” Mel said, and started down the hall to his room.
“For fifteen years you’ve raved about faith healers and cults and preachers who claim they’ve got a direct line to God being frauds,” B.T. said, following him, “and now you suddenly believe in it?”
He kept walking. “No.”
“But you’re telling me I’m supposed to believe in your revelation because it’s different, because this is the real thing.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Met said, turning to face him. “You’re the one who came out here and demanded to know what I was doing. I told you. You got what you came for. Now you can go back and tell Mrs. Bilderbeck I don’t have a brain tumor, it’s a chemical imbalance.”
“And what do you intend to do? Drive west until you fall off the Santa Monica pier?”
“I intend to find Him,” Mel said.
B.T. opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it and stormed off down the hall.
Mel stood there, watching him till a door slammed, down the hall.
Bring your friends, Mel thought. Bring your friends.
“For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.”
—I Corinthians 13:12
“I intend to find Him,” Mel had said, and was glad B.T. hadn’t shouted back “How?” because he had no idea.
He had not had a sign, which meant that the answer must be somewhere else. Mel sat down on the bed, opened the drawer of the bedside table, and got out the Gideon Bible.
He propped the pillows up against the headboard and leaned back against them and opened the Bible to the Book of Revelation.
The radio evangelists made it sound like the story of the Second Coming was a single narrative, but it was actually a hodgepodge of isolated scriptures—Matthew 24 and sections of Isaiah and Daniel, verses out of Second Thessalonians and John and Joel, stray ravings from Revelation and Jeremiah, all thrown together by the evangelists as if the authors were writing at the same time. If they were even writing about the same thing.
And the references were full of contradictions. A trumpet would sound, and Christ would come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Or on a white horse, leading an army of a hundred and forty-four thousand. Or like a thief in the night. There would be earthquakes and pestilences and a star falling out of heaven. Or a dragon would come up out of the sea, or four great beasts with the heads of a lion and a bear and a leopard and eagles’ wings. Or darkness would cover the earth.
But in all the assorted prophecies there were no locations mentioned. Joel talked about a desolate wilderness and Jeremiah about a wasteland, but not about where they were. Luke said the faithful would come “from the east, and from the west, and from the north” to the kingdom of God, but neglected to say where it was located.
The only place mentioned by name in all the prophecies was Armageddon. But Armageddon (or Har-Magedon or ‘Ar Himdah’) was a word that appeared only once in the Scriptures and whose meaning was not known, a word that might be Hebrew or Greek or something else altogether, that might mean “level” or “valley plain” or “place of desire.”
He put on his shoes and his coat and went out to the parking lot to get his road atlas out of the car.
B.T. was leaning against the trunk.
“How long have you been out here?” Mel asked, but the answer was obvious. B.T.’s dark face was pinched with cold, and his hands were jammed into his pockets like the carnival kid’s had been.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, his voice shivering with the cold. “I don’t have to be back until Thursday, and I can fly out of Denver just as easily as out of Omaha. If we drive as far as Denver together, it’ll give us more time—”
“For you to talk me out of this,” Mel said, and then was sorry when he saw the expression on B.T.’s face.
“For us to talk,” B.T. said. “For me to figure this—epiphany—out.”
“All right,” Mel said. “As far as Denver.” He opened the car door. “You can come inside now. I’m not going anywhere till morning.” He leaned inside the car and got the atlas. “It’s a good thing I came out for this. You didn’t actually intend to stand out here all night, did you?”
He nodded, his teeth chattering. “You’re not the only one who’s crazy.”
“By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.”
—Matthew 13:14
There wasn’t a Hertz rental car agency in Zion Center. “The nearest one’s in Redfield,” B.T. said unhappily.
“I’ll meet you there,” Mel said.
“Will you?” B.T. said. “You won’t take off on your own?”
“No,” Mel said.
“What if you see a sign?”
“If I see a burning bush, I’ll pull off on the side and let you know,” Mel said dryly. “We can caravan if you want.”
“Fine,” B.T. said. “I’ll follow you.”
“I don’t know where the rental place is.”
“I’ll pull ahead of you once we get to Redfield,” B.T. said, and got into his rental car. “It’s the second exit. What are the roads supposed to be like?”
“Icy. Snow-packed. But the weather report said clear.”
Mel got into his car. The kid from the carnival had been right. The ding had started to spread, raying out in three long cracks and one short one.
He led the way over to the interstate, being careful to signal lane changes and not to get too far ahead, so B.T. wouldn’t think he was trying to escape.
The carnival must have stayed the night in Zion Center, too. He passed a truck carrying the Tilt-a-Whirl and one full of stacked, slanted mirrors for, Mel assumed, the Hall of Mirrors. A Blazer roared past him with the bumper sticker “When the Rapture comes, I’m outta here!”
As soon as he was on the interstate, he turned on the radio. “…and snow-packed. Partly cloudy becoming clear by midmorning. Interstate 80 between Victor and Davenport is closed, also U.S. 35 and State Highway 218. Partly cloudy skies, clearing by midmorning. The following schools are closed: Edgewater, Bennett, Olathe, Oskaloosa, Vinton, Shellsburg. …”
Mel twisted the knob.
“…but the Second Coming is not something we believers have to be afraid of,” the evangelist, this one with a Texas accent, said, “for the Book of Revelation tells us that Christ will protect us from the final tribulation, and when He comes to power we will dwell with Him in His Holy City, which shines with jewels and precious stones, and we will drink from living fountains of water. The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and there…be…more—”
The evangelist sputtered into static and then out of range, which was just as well because Mel was heading into fog and needed to give his whole attention to his driving.
The fog got worse, descending like a smothering blanket. Mel turned on his lights. They didn’t help at all, but Mel hoped B.T. would be able to see his taillights the way Cassie had. He couldn’t see anything beyond a few yards in front of him. And if he had wanted a sign of his mental state, this was certainly appropriate.
“God has told us His will in no uncertain terms,” the radio evangelist thundered, coming suddenly back into range. “There can’t be any question about it.”
But he had dozens of questions. There had been no Megiddo on the map of Nebraska last night. Or of Kansas or Colorado or New Mexico, and nothing in all the prophecies about location except a reference to the New Jerusalem, and there was no New Jerusalem on the map either.
“And how do I know the Second Coming is at hand?” the evangelist roared, suddenly back in range. “Because the Bible tells us so. It tells us how He is coming and when!”
And that wasn’t true either. “Ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh,” Matthew had written, and Luke, “The Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not,” and even Revelation, “I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come.” It was the only thing they were all agreed on.
“The signs are all around us,” the evangelist shouted. “They’re as plain as the nose on your face! Air pollution, liberals outlawing school prayer, wickedness! Why, anybody’d have to be blind not to recognize them! Open your eyes and see!”
“All I see is fog,” Mel said, turning on the defrost and wiping his sleeve across the windshield, but it wasn’t the windshield. It was the world, which had vanished completely in the whiteness.
He nearly missed the turnoff to Redfield. Luckily, the fog was less dense in town, and they were able to find not only the rental car place, but the local Tastee-Freez. Mel went over to get some lunch to take with them while B.T. checked the car in.
It was full of farmers, all talking about the weather. “Damned meteorologists,” one of them, redfaced and wearing a John Deere cap and earmuffs, grumbled. “Said it was supposed to be clear.”
“It is clear,” another one in a down vest said. “He just didn’t say where. You get up above that fog, say thirty thousand feet, and it’s clear as a bell.”
“Number six,” the woman behind the counter called.
Mel went up to the counter and paid. There was a fluorescent green poster for the carnival taped up on the wall beside the counter. “Come have the time of your life!” it read. “Thrills, chills, excitement!”
Chills is right, Mel thought, thinking of how cold being up in a Ferris wheel in this fog would be.
It was an old sign. “Littletown, Dec. 24,” it read. “Ft. Dodge, Dec. 28. Cairo, Dec. 30.”
B.T. was already in the car when Mel got back with their hamburgers and coffee. He handed him the sack and got back on the highway.
That was a mistake. The fog was so thick he couldn’t even take a hand off the wheel to hold the hamburger B.T. offered him. “I’ll eat it later,” he said, leaning forward and squinting as if that would make things clearer. “You go ahead and eat, and we’ll switch places in a couple of exits.”
But there were no exits, or Mel couldn’t see them in the fog, and after twenty miles of it, he had B.T. hand him his coffee, now stone cold, and took a couple of sips.
“I’ve been looking at the Second Coming scientifically,” B.T. said. “‘A great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea and the third part of the sea became blood.’”
Mel glanced over. B.T. was reading from a black leather Bible. “Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“It was in the hotel room,” B.T. said.
“You stole a Gideon Bible?” Mel said.
“They put them there for people who need them. And I’d say we qualify. ‘There was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell into the earth. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.’
“All these things are supposed to happen along with the Second Coming,” B.T. sa
id. “Earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, pestilence, locusts.” He leafed through the flimsy pages. “‘And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.’”
He shut the Bible. “All right, earthquakes happen all the time, and there have been wars and rumors of wars for the last ten thousand years, and I guess this—’and the stars shall fall from the sky’—could refer to meteors. But there’s no sign of any of these other things. No locusts, no bottomless pit opening up, no ‘third part of trees and grass were burnt up and a third part of the creatures which were in the sea died.’”
“Nuclear war,” Mel said.
“What?”
“According to the evangelists, that’s supposed to refer to nuclear war,” Mel said. “And before that, to the Communist threat. Or fluoridation of water. Or anything else they disapprove of.”
“Well, whatever it stands for, no bottomless pit has opened up lately or we would have seen it on CNN. And volcanoes don’t cause locust swarms. Mel,” he said seriously, “let’s say your experience was a real epiphany. Couldn’t you have misinterpreted what it meant?”
And for a split second, Mel almost had it. The key to where He was and what was going to happen. The key to all of it.
“Couldn’t it have been about something else?” B.T. said. “Something besides the Second Coming?”
No, Mel thought, trying to hang on to the insight, it was the Second Coming, but—it was gone. Whatever it was, he’d lost it.
He stared blindly ahead at the fog, trying to remember what had triggered it. B.T. had said, “Couldn’t you have misunderstood what it meant?” No, that wasn’t right. “Couldn’t you—”
“What is it?” B.T. was pointing through the windshield. “What is that? Up ahead?”
“I don’t see anything,” Mel said, straining ahead. He couldn’t see anything but fog. “What was it?”
“I don’t know. I just saw a glimpse of lights.”
“Are you sure?” Mel said. There was nothing there but whiteness.
“There it is again,” B.T. said, pointing. “Didn’t you see it? Yellow flashing lights. There must be an accident. You’d better slow down.”