He was dressed in a suit, though his shirt was open. Bloody bandages wrapped his abdomen. The inside of the car was a mess. Crumpled bags from fast food chains, plastic bottles of Black Lightning energy drink, a wad of bloody gauze bandages. He’d thrown up somewhere in the car, and the stench was terrible. Most shocking was the condition of the Seratelli; the black hat had fallen onto the floor of the passenger side with the rest of the trash. Foul, bloody napkins and bandages were piled inside it.
What had happened? If he had time to concentrate, he could recall those memories. After all, everything that happened to the Vincent also happened to him. The calm, confident veneer that made him the Vincent was gone, evaporated between moments while he was hurtling down the highway at sixty-five miles per hour.
This had never happened before.
All other times when he’d worked as the Vincent, he had returned home with plenty of Evanimex in his system. Over the course of a few days he came down, returning to his old personality like a glider returning to earth. But this time the drug had worn off—and suddenly, in a rush of terror.
On the seat beside him, mixed in with the garbage, were a pistol and two pill bottles. The one that used to contain Evanimex was empty. The Vicodin bottle, thank God, was half-full. He found a bit of liquid at the bottom of a Black Lightning bottle and swallowed half a dozen of the pills. He was soaked in sweat, and every movement sent pain racketing through his body. He wanted to lie down, but he knew that falling asleep in the car was inviting the police to investigate. He had to keep moving.
Tears rolled from his eyes. This wasn’t fair!
He started the car again. The GPS told him he was thirteen hours from home.
* * *
The apartment was dark, and strangely silent. The air smelled of death. He flipped on a light and moaned.
In the center of the kitchen floor, a bison cow, barely three inches long, lay on its side, dead. How had it gotten in here? It shouldn’t have been able to get through the barrier. The air stank of grease and methane. On the counter was a cutting board, and beside it a small pile of fur and bones.
Al, he thought. Al, the neighbor he’d trusted, had been eating the herd.
He hobbled to the living room, trying to keep his weight on his left leg. The grow lights were off, even though it was daytime. The living prairie grass had turned brown, and was dying in vast patches. He could not see any of his bison. Where was the herd?
He made his way back to the bedroom. There he found the Poomba, inert, in the middle of the carpet. The little robot was dead, not even an indicator light. The herd was nowhere in sight.
Then he heard a faint chirp, the high-pitched grunt of the micro bison. He braced himself against the bed and dropped to one knee, grimacing from the pain. If not for the Vicodin he would have passed out. Slowly he lay down on the dry, sickly grass. There under the bed was a pair of cows.
Two, out of thirty-eight.
Al would pay for this. A man’s herd was sacred. Vinnie would become the Vincent, get his gun, and take that walk down that hallway.…
He passed out dreaming of frontier justice.
* * *
Someone was knocking at his door. Banging, really. He wasn’t sure how long the noise had been going on, but soon enough it stopped. He was drifting between sleep and wakefulness on a raft made of pain.
He heard a deep voice. Al. Coming to poach the last of his cattle. He struggled to open his eyes. He needed the Vincent’s gun. Where was the gun?
“You can go,” another voice said. This one was female. “I’m his sister.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Accident,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Just tell him it wasn’t my fault,” Al said. “He was supposed to come back in a couple days! The critters just started dying. What was I supposed to do?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Some time passed. Lights came on, and he shut his eyes.
“Do you know who I am?” the female voice said.
He tried to guess. The Vincent’s memories were hard to sort through. Was it the red-haired one? Or the tiny one? If it was the tiny one … that would be bad. The Vincent had been afraid of what she could do.
“You shot my girlfriend,” she said.
“It wasn’t me,” he said.
“I’m getting tired of hearing that.”
She crouched next to him. He heard a click, and then the woman was talking to someone else on the phone.
“I’m here,” she said. There was a pause. “Right. Is Aaqila ready for the video?”
The woman touched Vinnie on the face. “Open your eyes, Vincent. That’s it.” He was looking at the pinhole camera of a pen. Then the woman said, “See? It’s him. I’m sending the address now.”
Another silence, and then the woman said, “So we’re good?”
A moment later the woman clicked off the pen. She seemed very satisfied.
“We’ve got some time,” she said. “Tell me all about yourself.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
My father used to say that every evil in Canada could be found within a mile of the 401, and he would have included the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre. The EMDC was an overcrowded, aging prison campus a couple hours southwest of Toronto, in London. After six months I’d had enough of the place. Unfortunately they made me stay another year and a half.
Bobby had been pacing the waiting room, and when I finally appeared he galloped to me and crushed me in a hug. The treasure chest still hung from his neck, though now it hung from a metal chain.
“How you doing, kid?” I asked him. “Still hanging in there?” He didn’t get the joke.
Toronto was no place for me—I still didn’t quite trust Fayza to abide by our deal—so instead we drove north, toward Lake Huron. The trees were ablaze with color. I’d missed a few seasons while inside, and I was glad to get out before the snow came down.
Our destination was over three hours away, but Bobby seemed prepared to deliver a monologue that lasted the entire trip. He had a new roommate who had a set of weird habits completely different from the weird habits of all previous roommates. He’d gotten a new job, working in a distribution center for a big online site. He’d stayed off drugs like I’d asked.
“How’s Lamont?”
“Oh,” he said. “I had to give him up. No cats allowed in the new place.”
He wanted stories from prison. “Like what?” I asked. “Showers? Pillow fights? Nazi lesbian guards?”
“No! I mean … no! I was talking about, I don’t know, escape attempts?”
“No escapes, kid. It was actually weirdly calm.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.
We stopped for supper at an Italian place that promised Killer Kalzones. I went into the bathroom and opened the little plastic bag given to me by the helpful doctors of the Ministry of Public Safety and Security. Inside was a bottle of 120 pills of phenacemide, the antiepileptic I’d been taking while in their care. Best to take with food. I looked myself in the mirror as I swallowed two pills. The only person looking back was me.
It was well past dark when we arrived in Meaford, a little town on the shore. My mother had grown up there. The car directed Bobby west of town. Bobby pulled in the driveway and cut the lights. The windows of the farmhouse were dark.
“This is it, right?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah, I just thought … Well. You want to come in? It’s too far to drive back to Toronto tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“You like sleepovers, don’t you?”
We went up the steps. The email I’d gotten said the key would be under a ceramic pot, which I hoped I could find in the dark. Before I could look down, the door opened and the lights flicked on.
Ollie. Her expression was worried. She looked at my face, but her eyes weren’t quite tracking mine.
“It’s me,” I said.
Her face lit up. The visual was har
d for her when she was on her meds, but voices always broke through.
She pulled my face down to hers and kissed me fiercely. We stood like that for a long time, unwilling to let each other go.
Something brushed past my ankles. I broke the kiss and looked down. “Is that Lamont?”
“Still clean and sober,” Ollie said.
“Poor bastard.”
* * *
Ollie had made a cake, but wouldn’t let us eat it.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
She wouldn’t answer. Playing coy.
Bobby lay on the floor, trying to get Lamont interested in a catnip-filled mouse, but the cat was taking a hard-line antidrug approach. Ollie and I sat on the couch, leaning into each other, holding hands like teenagers. We didn’t need to talk; we’d done nothing but talk for twenty-four months. In prison, no cell phones, pens, or internet-capable devices were allowed, but it was impossible to keep them out; just about everything these days was an internet-capable device. My second day at the EMDC I traded my dessert for a piece of smartpaper with a Wi-Fi connection. On our first call, Ollie walked me through installing what she called “real” encryption software. Every night we talked about the past—including everything she’d learned from Rovil and his sociopath-for-hire—and about the future. We burned up the airwaves with our words.
While we waited for the proper, secret time to have cake, Ollie showed me the latest news on one of our most frequent topics. Numinous was spreading through the States and Canada’s biggest cities. The Landon-Rousse scandal, and Rovil Gupta’s video confession, recorded just before he disappeared, had only accelerated curiosity about the drug. Stepladder was dead, but NME 110 was alive and well. It had spread beyond the walls of the Church of the Hologrammatic God. The chemjet blueprints were all over the internet. Numinous was a recreational drug now, with all that entailed: theme parties, overdoses, suicides, novelty T-shirts.
“I didn’t think it would happen so fast,” I said.
“We’ve never had something like this before.”
“Sure we have,” I said. “It was called the Great Awakening. But this time the crash is going to be bad.”
The message icon on the screen blinked on, and Ollie flicked her hand at it. The screen changed to show a hand-lettered sign that said WELCOME HOME!
The sign dropped away. Sasha, looking sophisticated in a pale green dress, opened her arms in a ta-da.
She had only a few minutes until Eduard and Suzette checked on her, so we ate quickly. On her side of the screen Sasha bounced on the edge of her bed while eating one of Esperanza’s cookies.
I leaned over to Ollie and whispered, “She has little girl boobies.”
“I know,” she whispered back.
“Should we tell her about bras?”
“Not in front of Bobby we don’t,” Ollie said.
The eating didn’t interrupt Sasha’s texting; the words scrolled across the bottom of the screen almost too fast to read. It seems like we should have a chair for Dr. Gloria, she said.
“That party’s over,” I said. “She’s long gone.”
YOU CAN’T JUST THROW HER AWAY!!
“Kid, there’s nothing to throw away.”
Just ’cause she’s imaginary, doesn’t mean she’s not real, Sasha said. You can’t throw away yourSELF.
* * *
Meaford was a small town, but even here there were cameras in the stores. Our faces would eventually pop up in some database, and anyone with enough money and energy would be able to find us. Fayza, for example. We’d have to keep moving, even if it meant breaking my parole.
But there was one person I wanted to find me. It took a few days, but I finally was able to get a message through to him. The call came on what felt like the last day of fall, a cold wind whipping off the lake, picking off the last of the leaves from their limbs.
“Hey, Gil. Thank you for calling me.”
“Gil is pleased to see you,” the god said. His face was still thin and bony, with the strong cheekbones of a prophet.
“I’d rather we talked in person, but…”
He nodded. We were both convicted felons. He could never cross over to Canada, and I’d never set foot in the States again. Legally, at least.
“I never thanked you,” I said. “For what you did.”
“Thanks aren’t necessary. We did it not only for you, but for the child. And we knew that Gil needed to be in prison, among those people, to start the ministry.”
Sure, I thought. That’s always the way with divine plans. No such thing as an accident.
“Can I tell you a story?” I said. “About three months into my sentence I got cornered. A couple of women I’d pissed off—it’s too complicated to explain. They caught me in a bathroom. One of them had a knife. I should have died.
“But here’s the crazy thing. Four other women I’d never met burst in and saved me. I didn’t get a scratch. Afterward, they gave me a slip of paper. You know what it said?”
He smiled.
“Half of EMDC is on Numinous,” I said. “The male units, the female unit I was in—paper is flowing through there every day. Some of the guards are converts. They think it’s their duty to spread the word. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of your chemjets was running in a back room.”
“It’s been known to happen,” Gil said.
“The first time I ever saw one of them was in a church in Toronto. I thought, Edo built this. I thought only a rich man could afford to make it.”
“Churches raise money,” Gil said. “That’s what they do. Even peasants can build a cathedral.”
“But you’re losing control,” I said. “Numinous may have started in the prisons with you, but it’s out there on its own now. It’s a party drug. Frat boys are getting religion.”
“We never wanted control,” Gil said.
“What do you want?”
He smiled deprecatingly. “For people to know me,” he said. “That’s why I sent the printer and pictures to Edo, so that he would see what I was doing, and share. I wanted him to know me. And you as well, Lyda.”
“I know you,” I said. “You’re not a god; you’re a symptom. Now that people can get the drug outside of your church, it’ll lose its mystique. Once people understand how NME affects the brain—”
“It won’t make any difference,” Gil said. “The more people hear of it, the more people will try it—and then they’ll never go back.”
“Unless they overdose or die,” I said. “Numinous can’t escape the physics of tolerance. People will stop being able to feel God’s love as intensely as before, and they’ll have to ramp up the dosage. It’s already happening.”
“Then we’ll print more,” Gil said.
“Jesus, Gil, you want more overdoses? Freaks like us? And what about the people who can’t get the drug after they’ve used it? Emergency rooms are already filling with Francines, looking for a shortcut to the afterlife.”
“Francines?”
“A girl. She was the first person I met from your church. She killed herself after she went into withdrawal.”
“Was she so happy before she came to the church?”
I didn’t want to answer that.
“People need the divine in their lives,” Gil said. “Science is a pale, unconvincing story compared to faith. You offer nothing—a mind that dies with the body. Numinous offers a living god. A god of love.”
“You’re an obese IT geek who overdosed on an experiment.”
He laughed hard. “Formerly obese,” he said after he’d recovered. “But yes, that’s true.” He wiped away a tear of laughter. “Nobody jokes with me anymore. Too awestruck.”
“I knew you when,” I said. “If you’re God, we’re all screwed.”
Gil caught his breath. “Don’t be afraid of what’s coming,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right. Think of those prisoners who saved you. Think of the old Gil, the old Edo and Lyda—even Rovil. Even if it’s just a drug, an
d I am lying to you now about being a deity—aren’t we better people than we were before?”
THE PARABLE OF
the Faithful Atheist
There was a scientist who did not believe in gods or fairies or supernatural creatures of any sort. But she had once known an angel, and had talked to her every day. Mostly they argued, often about whether or not the angel existed. The scientist finally won the argument by trapping the angel inside a prescription bottle.
One day, two years after the angel had been captured, the scientist grew curious and decided to look inside the bottle. She opened the lid and peeked inside. She saw nothing but pills. Then she tossed out the pills. But still the angel was nowhere to be found.
This confused the scientist, and also saddened her.
Sometime later, in the middle of winter, she went walking in the woods, and came upon a man sitting on a rock. The snow was piled all around him, and he looked like he’d been there for some time. He was a white man with ruddy skin and a great halo of gray hair.
The scientist stopped, and was very afraid. She had seen this man twice before, once in a city in the north, and once in another city hundreds of miles away to the southeast, and now here, in the northern woods. He did not look like the kind of man who could afford airplane tickets. He was dressed in many layers of clothing. The outmost coat was crusted with snow and dirt. Below were jackets, fleeces, sweaters, dress shirts, and T-shirts, each layer older than the one above it, like geological strata. At the man’s feet, resting against the base of the rock he sat upon, was a bulging black garbage bag that the scientist assumed contained all the man’s worldly possessions.
The scientist overcame her fear and marched up to the man. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she said.
The man said nothing. He sat on the rock, looking down at his black bag.
“You think this is funny?” the scientist said. “This magical hobo shit? My god, why didn’t you make yourself black, too? I mean, Jesus, what’s the point?”
The man became very still. His skin grew pale as porcelain. Hairline fractures appeared, and then began to split wide. Light burned through the seams, and the scientist fell back, holding up a hand against the light. With a sound like a crack of thunder, the man’s outer shell shattered and fell away, clothing and skin and hair crackling like glass, until the angel was revealed.
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