What in God's Name: A Novel

by Simon Rich

  Eliza shook her head. “He didn’t even mention it.”

  Brian rolled his eyes. “Of course he didn’t.”

  He dragged a second chair into the cubicle.

  “Sit down,” he commanded. “We’re going to have some fun.”

  The Server was a complicated piece of software, but its function was simple: to record everything that ever happened on Earth. By throwing a few keywords into the mainframe, you could watch any event in human history, from any angle, in fast-forward, rewind, or freeze-frame. The program was invented for research purposes, but the Angels used it for one thing and one thing only: procrastination.

  “Come on,” Brian said. “I’ll show you how Lincoln gets shot.”

  “That’s so morbid,” Eliza said, but she could feel herself inching closer to the screen.

  Brian typed “Ford’s Theater Washington DC,” “Abraham Lincoln,” and “1865” into a search box. A few different windows popped up; apparently, Lincoln had attended several shows that year.

  “We want this one,” Brian said, clicking on the box with the latest date.

  Eliza watched in rapt silence as Brian zoomed in on the theater’s red-brick roof. The roof grew in size on the screen, then suddenly disappeared, replaced by a grid of balding scalps and floral bonnets. They were inside the theater, looking down on the audience.

  Brian tilted the view slightly so they could see the stage.

  “Let’s skip ahead,” he said, clicking on the fast-forward icon.

  The actors buzzed back and forth across the clapboard stage, gesturing rapidly. The audience clapped and laughed in unison.

  “Here it comes,” Brian said.

  He zoomed in on a roped-off area in the upper balcony. At first Eliza thought Brian had selected the wrong box; it was empty except for an unattractive elderly couple. But as he zoomed in closer she realized that they were the Lincolns. She hadn’t recognized them. She’d seen paintings of them before, but they looked so different in real life.

  Brian unclicked fast-forward, and they watched the Lincolns watch the play in real time. Mary Todd was a lot heavier than Eliza had expected (the portrait artists had obviously been kind). Her flabby neck glistened with sweat, and she kept dabbing at it with a coarse beige handkerchief. There was a small black hair growing out of a mole on her cheek, and she picked at it from time to time, never quite extracting it. The president never laughed at the play, but he smiled genially throughout the second act. His eyes were damp and deeply sunken in his pale, crinkled face.

  Suddenly a sweaty man appeared behind the couple, holding a small black derringer. He was surprisingly handsome. He paused for a moment, then slowly raised the gun to Lincoln’s head.

  “I can’t watch!” Eliza shouted, covering her eyes. When she next looked at the screen, the president was lying on the rug, a murky red puddle pooling horribly by his skull.

  “Want to watch it in slo-mo?” Brian asked, shaking some more Alka-Seltzer onto his desk.

  Eliza shook her head. “Could we maybe switch it to something…less horrible?”

  “Sure,” Brian said. “We can watch whatever we want.”

  Before Eliza knew it, they had spent three hours surfing the Server. They watched the first Beatles rehearsal (surprisingly boring) and Mozart’s first recital at Versailles (disappointingly brief). They watched Joan of Arc give a rambling speech to a pack of worried soldiers. They watched Nefertiti take a bath—an outrageously complicated process, which took them twenty minutes to get through, even in fast-forward. Eliza grimaced as the English let loose on the Spanish Armada, torching their ships and scorching their sailors. She laughed at an Athenian dwarf as he tumbled crazily across a sunlit marble stage.

  But the most absorbing discovery was something she found by accident. She was watching some seventeenth-century Indians trap beavers when she clicked the zoom out icon. The Indians shrank down to specks, and jagged coastlines appeared on all sides.

  “What’s that little island?” she asked, pointing at the rectangular strip of land.

  “That’s Manhattan,” he said. “See?”

  He clicked fast-forward, and the city began to take shape. First a cluster of houses spread messily across the island’s southern tip. Then came cobblestone streets, cutting through the forest like a pack of silver snakes, eating all the trees in their path.

  “Can we go faster?”

  Brian clicked the ×500 icon, and a grid of roads cut brutally through the forest, followed by a smattering of farmhouses. The blur of horses swelled—then vanished—replaced by a smudge of cars. Downtown the city rose, then burned, then rose again—this time in steel and glass. Planes popped suddenly into the frame, clogging the sky, obscuring the view. And then the action suddenly came to a stop. They’d reached the present moment.

  “Look at all the people,” Eliza whispered, zooming in on Times Square. “I mean, honestly…there’s no way to help them all.”

  Brian laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They never know the difference.”

  “And then we watched the Titanic go down!” Eliza told Craig breathlessly. “There was this Irish guy—he was dressed up as a woman. And when they confronted him on the lifeboat, he spoke in this crazy high-pitched voice, like, ‘Oh, heavens! I’m just a wee lady!’”

  Craig nodded. “I’ve seen that.”

  “You know the band didn’t actually ‘play on,’ like people say. They pretty much just screamed and panicked like everyone else. Two of them tried to dress up as women, but they couldn’t find bonnets. Then we watched Oscar Wilde die! Get this: they say his last words were ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do’—but actually he said, ‘I need more morphine and someone needs to wash my ass.’ Not so witty, huh? What else…oh! Helen of Troy wasn’t really that pretty. And Paul Revere never warned anyone about the British! He just told people that’s where he was going, because he was too afraid to stick around and fight!”

  She noticed that Craig was ignoring her.

  “Craig? What’s wrong?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He turned on his computer and stared in silence at the load screen.

  “You know…it’s not always a great idea to watch stuff like that on the Server.”

  She saluted sarcastically. “I know, I know. ‘Research only.’”

  “It’s not that,” he said, his eyes still on the screen. “It’s just…”

  He faced her. “It’ll make you feel bad, you know? It’ll make you cynical.”

  Eliza noticed with shock that Craig’s eyes were a bit shiny, almost like he was trying to hold back tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have talked about it so much.”

  Craig forced a laugh, embarrassed. “It’s fine!” he said. “No big deal! I’m just exhausted, you know…I’m just tired.”

  He dragged a sleeve roughly across his face. “What do you say we get to work?”

  Eliza smiled softly at him. “That sounds great, Craig.”

  Computers in the Miracles Department came equipped with several powerful search engines. There was Omnex, which allowed Angels to locate specific humans. There was RoomScanner, which allowed them to find missing objects. There was Hydrosearch for drinking wells and Gushspot for oil and Google for news. But Craig’s favorite tool by far was ComCheck.

  ComCheck—short for “compatibility check”—was an impressive piece of computer engineering. By measuring thousands of key variables, it calculated with perfect certainty how happy two people would make each other over the course of their lifetimes. “Never try to link two humans,” the manual warned, “unless you’ve run ComCheck first.”

  “It’s no wonder they’re in love,” Craig said. “Look.”

  He typed Sam’s and Laura’s names into the computer, pressed F4, and waited for the results to tabulate. When the numbers came in, Eliza whistled with excitement. Compatibility scores ranged fr
om 0 (“inevitable murder-suicide”) to 100 (“guaranteed bliss”). Sam and Laura scored 96. They had identical senses of humor and the same taste in furniture. They shared a fondness for garlic and a hatred of mushrooms. They were physically attracted to each other, and even though Sam was predisposed to baldness, Laura found that trait endearing. They even liked different flavors of Life Savers, so if they ever bought a pack at a movie theater, there would be no quarreling or resentment. The only thing keeping them from a perfect score was Sam’s deviated septum: Laura was a light sleeper, and his snoring was sure to wake her up occasionally. But that could be corrected someday, with minor surgery.

  “How did they meet?” Eliza asked.

  “I’ll show you,” Craig said.

  He typed “Sam Katz AND Laura Potts” into the Server and clicked on the earliest link.

  EARTH—SEPTEMBER 4, 2007

  Laura Potts read about the protest on the activities board. The flyer was red and enormous.

  Every two hours, a Bangladeshi child is murdered in a factory for no reason.

  Do something about it.

  Saturday at noon.

  14th Street and Broadway.

  She questioned the flyer’s accuracy (that statistic added up to twelve murdered children each day). But she couldn’t stomach another day of solitude, another day of eating granola bars from the vending machine and debating whether to call her mother. She had skipped the Sigma Nu party and slept through the Statue of Liberty trip. It was the last day of freshman orientation, and this protest was her last chance to make friends, possibly ever.

  So far college had been a disaster. She shared a six-person suite with five recruited field hockey players, monstrous, horselike women who hogged the shower and wielded sticks wherever they went. She’d tried to talk to them, but they were always rushing off to the gym or the dining hall, and they never seemed to hear her. She was constantly repeating herself, over and over again, in every conversation.

  “Hey, I’m Laura from Athens, Georgia.”

  “What?”

  “Athens!”

  “What?”

  “The South!”

  “Oh.”

  These exchanges worried her. Was her accent so unusual? Was her voice so faint?

  Her two closest friends had gone to the University of Georgia. She wanted to call them but was afraid she would start to cry over the phone. Instead, she sent them short, controlled e-mails that she wrote in the style of a New York City guidebook. “There are so many amazing restaurants,” her last one raved. “You could eat at a different one each night for your entire life and still not try them all!” In truth, she had been to only one restaurant, a shockingly expensive Japanese place with ridiculous tin menus. She went on her second night at school with a large group of freshmen. The waiter made her repeat her order six times and eventually asked her to write it down on a piece of paper. She sat across from a boy from Los Angeles and a girl from Connecticut who talked about books she hadn’t heard of. During the first minute of the conversation, Laura lied about having read Siddhartha and spent the rest of the meal visualizing what would happen if she got caught. By the time dessert came, the boy and girl were talking about politics and their ankles were entwined beneath the table. Laura sat in silence, praying someone would speak to her. After ten mute minutes, a nervous boy tapped her on the shoulder. She swiveled toward him, smiling brightly.

  “Hey!” she said. “What’s up?”

  “If you had sake,” he mumbled, “then it’s seventy-eight dollars.”

  On the morning of the protest, Laura got up early and put in her contact lenses. She was determined to socialize, even if it meant joining the Bangladeshi cause. She put on her most “alternative” sweatshirt, a brown hemp hoodie, and on the short walk to Fourteenth Street, she resolved to make at least one friend.

  Laura knew she’d made a mistake when she saw the protest leader. She was standing on an upturned bucket, beating a large, misshapen drum. Her dress was black and sack-shaped, and she was screaming.

  “There are four thousand child slaves toiling in Bangladeshi factories! They toil at their looms for eighteen hours a day in sweltering, windowless bunkers. If a child leaves his workstation he is shot in the face by a member of the Chittagong Army! Is that justice?”

  The crowd yelled “No!” in unison.

  “He is shot in the face!” the woman emphasized.

  Laura realized with panic that everyone but her was wearing black. Her armpits prickled with perspiration. The flyer hadn’t said anything about a dress code.

  She took a deep breath and marched intrepidly into the fray. A glowering girl made eye contact with her, and Laura seized the opportunity, blurting out her standard introduction.

  “Hi, I’m Laura!”

  The girl handed her a flyer and kept on walking, shuffling her way through the crowd. Laura noticed that the back of the girl’s shirt pictured the face of a screaming Bangladeshi child. Beneath the child, in red block letters, a caption read simply: “Justice?” She wondered how quickly she could leave without appearing to be insensitive.

  A bony palm gripped her shoulder. When she turned around, an emaciated girl was addressing her in a squeaky falsetto. “Is this your first die-in?”

  Laura swallowed. Had she inadvertently joined some kind of suicide pact?

  “What’s a die-in?”

  “It’s when you simulate death,” the girl explained. “To protest the unjust deaths of others.”

  A large gong sounded, and the skinny girl’s eyes suddenly widened.

  “It’s starting!”

  Laura watched in horror as the screaming protest leader unfurled a banner (“This many Bangladeshi children are murdered each week”). And before she had time to think, she was lying on the filthy sidewalk, her right check pressed into the pavement.

  Several feet away, Sam Katz shifted uncomfortably and tried to make sense of his situation. He didn’t even know what this particular protest was about. He had been on his way to the library when an enraged girl thrust a flyer in his face.

  “Do you care whether children live or die?”

  Sam flinched. “I guess I’d rather they live?”

  “Then do something!”

  She muscled him into the center of the crowd, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the ground, surrounded by strangers and lonelier than ever. He’d been at NYU for a whole week, and this five-second exchange with the protester was the longest conversation he’d had yet.

  Near his face a loudspeaker blasted a Bangladeshi song. It was loud, atonal, and full of screaming.

  “Takana! Murti! Takana!”

  It was crazy music and Sam realized, with panic, that it was going to make him laugh. He bit his lip. He’d been working so hard to pass himself off as a real New Yorker; yawning at the sight of tall buildings, ignoring celebrities on the street, writing in his Moleskine notebook, and sneering whenever anyone smiled at him. It seemed to be working. But if he laughed right now, in front of all of these smart political types, his Oklahoma origins would be plain for all to see.

  “Takana! Takana! Takana!”

  Sam clenched his jaw. The instruments had cut out—and now the song was just pure a cappella screaming. He could feel the laughter rising uncontrollably in his throat, as unstoppable as a pepper sneeze. He was about to give up the fight when he heard a high-pitched giggle coming from about six feet away. He craned his neck and spotted a girl wearing an odd brown sweatshirt, with her hands clamped tightly over her mouth. She flashed him an embarrassed smile, and he smiled right back, forgetting that he was supposed to sneer, forgetting he was in New York, forgetting practically everything.

  “That’s it?” Eliza asked. “That’s the whole clip?”

  Craig nodded. “That’s it.”

  “What ended up happening? You know, after the protest?”

  “The Chittagong Army continued to gain strength,” Craig told her. “Their atrocities continue to this day.”

&
nbsp; “No,” Eliza said. “I mean, what happened with Sam and Laura?”

  “Oh. Nothing.”

  “They didn’t talk after the protest?”

  Craig shook his head. “Their next meeting isn’t for another eight months. Here it is—Fifteenth Street and Irving.”

  He clicked on the link, and Eliza shifted impatiently in her seat, waiting for the clip to start.

  EARTH—MAY 12, 2008

  Sam stood across the street from Irving Plaza, trying to breathe like a normal person. He’d spotted Laura twenty minutes ago, through the plate-glass window of a gyro shop, and he was determined to finally speak to her. It wasn’t his first opportunity—they’d shared a dining hall for months. But the odds were it was his last chance of the year. Classes had ended on Friday, and he was flying home to Tulsa at six the next morning. If he didn’t make his move right now, who knew when he’d get another shot?

  He rehearsed his opening line under his breath a few times, debating various deliveries. Finally, he walked across the street and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “You in line for the show?”

  Laura nodded. She’d been watching Sam for about ten minutes, trying to figure out why he kept mumbling under his breath. She’d wanted to meet him ever since the protest but hadn’t had the guts to approach him.

  “I love the Fuzz,” Sam said. “They’re kind of reminiscent of early Brian Eno.”

  Laura smiled confusedly. She’d never heard of Brian Eno. She was debating whether to feign agreement with him when the line started moving.

  “Guess it’s starting,” she said, shuffling along with the crowd.

  “Oh!” Sam said. “Okay. Well…sayonara!”

  She waved awkwardly. “Bye!”

  Sam shook his head wearily. He’d finally worked up the courage to talk to her, after months of campus stalking, and it had gone all wrong. Why had he said that thing about Brian Eno? And “sayonara”? What the hell was that? The conversation had been such an unmitigated disaster he almost felt like laughing. His only solace was that nobody had been around to see it.