“It’s like some sort of peeping Tom,” Buddha says.
“Maybe God’s a pervert,” the woman says.
“I wonder what kind of drugs God would do,” Buddha says.
Titan parks the Porsche in the driveway and they go inside. The house is crowded with people. Titan knows most of their faces but can only remember a few of their names. He hasn’t talked to some of these people in months, if not years. He doesn’t care. He says hello and shakes hands and laughs at their jokes about the apocalypse. It’s just like doing another work event. He moves in the direction of the bedroom with the woman from across the street. When he finds the Sandman in the living room, though, he stops and asks him what he’s doing there.
“Precog says you’re serious about this quitting thing,” the Sandman says. “I’m supposed to support you as a valued team member and provide friendship incentives for you to stay.” He smiles at the woman from across the street. “Have we met?” he asks her, but she just looks at him and doesn’t say anything.
“I’m done with the company,” Titan tells the Sandman. “I’m done with everything.”
“All right,” the Sandman says, still smiling at the woman. “All right.”
Buddha sits down on the couch and spreads his bags of drugs on the coffee table. On the monitor on the living room wall, CNN is now showing a riot in the streets of Jerusalem.
“I’ve never been there,” Titan says. “I guess now I’ll never get the chance.”
“I wouldn’t want to be there at this particular moment,” the Sandman says.
“Maybe not right now,” Titan agrees. “But maybe before.”
“How is it any different now?” the Sandman asks.
Titan shakes his head. He turns to the woman from across the street, but she’s not there anymore. He looks for her in the crowd, but he can’t find her. He looks back at the monitor.
“It seems we may have been premature in one of our earlier reports,” an anchor says. “It turns out Hawaii hasn’t sunk into the sea. But stay tuned – it still may.”
“If you don’t come back to work, can I have your computer?” the Sandman asks.
Titan walks away from him without answering. He looks for the woman but can’t see her anywhere. He goes into the kitchen, but she’s not there either. He checks outside, thinking maybe she’s gone home. Her house is dark, the street empty.
Titan looks up at the sky. There are rifts in the clouds now, with lights shining through the holes. Angels rise up to them from all over the city and pass through, out of sight. The angel in the yard is still looking in the window. Titan goes back inside.
He pushes his way through the crowd and remembers when crowds used to part before him. He opens the door to the guest room first, but it’s empty. Then he opens the door to the bedroom he shares with Inviselle.
The woman from across the street is there, on the bed. She’s wrapped in an embrace with Inviselle, who’s strobing in and out of sight. They both stop and look at Titan.
“I’ve been watching her for months,” Inviselle says.
Titan doesn’t say anything.
“She undresses for me,” Inviselle says.
Titan doesn’t say anything.
“She’s a mind reader,” Inviselle says.
The woman from across the street smiles at Titan. “You can watch,” she says.
“Hot,” the Sandman says from behind Titan.
Titan goes back into the living room. CNN shows an angel walking across the lawn of the White House. Secret Service agents in black suits step out from behind trees and bushes, guns in their hands. But they just watch as the angel walks past them and into the White House. One of the agents says something into his lapel. Another agent sits down on the lawn and cries.
Titan goes down into the basement. The simulator is back on. The ice zombies feast on his fallen body on the floor of the cave. Titan ignores them and takes off his clothes. He puts on the simulator uniform. He wants one of his real uniforms from the closet, but he doesn’t want to go back into the bedroom again. He goes upstairs in his simulated uniform, then outside and onto the lawn.
The angel turns away from the window, toward him. Titan punches it in the face. There was a time when his fists could shatter buildings. The angel just rocks back a bit. He punches it again, then again and again. There’s blood on the angel’s face now, and on his hand. He doesn’t know which of them is bleeding. He keeps hitting it, even though it doesn’t fight back, until he’s out of breath and has to step away.
He bends down for a moment, resting his hands on his knees. The angel pants in unison with him. When Titan looks up, he sees people staring from all the windows. The Sandman toasts him with a drink. Inviselle and the woman from across the street stand in the doorway, wrapped together in a bedsheet. Inviselle covers her mouth with her hands. The woman from across the street nods like she knew this would happen. Titan can see the monitor in the living room through the window. The astronauts are screaming.
The angel doesn’t take its eyes off Titan. It doesn’t even blink.
Titan straightens up, even though he still hasn’t caught his breath. He adjusts his uniform.
“All right,” he says. “We’re not going to live forever.”
For a few seconds there are no sounds but their breathing. Then a distant siren begins somewhere.
“We’re not going to live forever!” Titan cries, although he’s not sure if his words are a challenge or a plea.
The angel’s lips twist into something that could be a smile. Then it spreads its wings and lunges at him, and Titan rushes to meet it.
Casual
MIRACLES
Most of the people who wanted miracles found Zane through Craigslist. He had an ad he never took down in the Casual Miracles section. There was no other miracles section, but Zane wasn’t capable of other kinds anyway.
He’d been performing miracles for years, ever since the accident, so he was no longer surprised at what people wanted. The week before, a woman had called him to her house and asked him to change her locks. When Zane told her she needed a locksmith, she’d hugged herself and said it had to be done right now. The next day, a man messaged him a photo of rims he wanted for his truck. Zane messaged him back to let him know people only got one miracle. Was he sure that was what he wanted to spend it on? The man replied that the rims had been discontinued and he couldn’t find them anywhere.
Zane always performed the miracles. He’d learned early on not to judge. He charged extra for people like the man who wanted rims, though. But not the woman who wanted her locks changed. He figured she had her reasons.
Then there were the people he wanted to help, even though sometimes he couldn’t. The way the miracles ended for him was one of those situations.
It began like most of them did, with a text.
I’m looking for a miracle.
Who isn’t? Zane texted back.
The next text was just a street address. If Zane had looked it up first, maybe he wouldn’t have gone. But he didn’t bother to check it. He just got in his Corolla, which still had the dent of the woman in the hood, and followed the directions his phone gave him until it said he had arrived. The address was a low, long brick building surrounded by a small park with paved walking trails. A woman sat on a wooden bench in the park beside a man in a wheelchair with a blanket wrapped around his body. Both of them stared at Zane as he drove by, looking at the sign over the front doors of the building. New Peace Hospice.
Zane could have kept on driving. Maybe he should have kept on driving. But he was here. He parked on the street so the Corolla’s oil leak wouldn’t stain the hospice’s driveway or parking lot. He felt a place like this had to be respected. He checked the address again to make sure it was right and then went inside.
A woman stood in the lobby, watching him. She was pregnant and looked like she was going to give birth at any moment. She was running her hands over her belly when he walked in and she didn’t stop.
“You’re the angel,” she said. It was half question, half statement.
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Zane said. He didn’t like the name people used for miracle workers like him, but he understood why they used it. He’d long ago given up trying to get people to use some other word. He didn’t really know what to call himself, after all.
“We need you this way,” she said and turned to walk down a hall.
Zane looked around the lobby. A woman sat behind a reception counter, watching him. Past her was the entrance to a small cafeteria. A man sat alone at one of the tables, tethered to an oxygen tank. Classical music played somewhere, but Zane didn’t recognize it. He followed the woman down the hall. Most of the doors on either side were open, but he didn’t look inside them.
The woman led him to a room that looked like a hotel suite. There was a bed, a small table under the window, a dresser with a vase of dead flowers on it and a couple of chairs. A landscape of nowhere in particular hung over the bed. The bedside tables were covered in photos of young men, women and children. Pill bottles were scattered among the photos. An elderly woman lay in the bed, the blankets up to her chin. She took a long, shuddering breath every now and then. A middle-aged man in a suit sat in one of the chairs. He looked at Zane, then went back to looking at the woman in the bed.
The pregnant woman sat in the other chair while Zane stood at the foot of the bed. He looked down at the older woman, who took another ragged breath as he watched.
“I can’t save her life,” Zane said. “That’s not the kind of miracle I can do.”
He didn’t think it was the kind of miracle anyone could do. He’d never heard of it happening, anyway.
“We know,” the pregnant woman said. “The other angel told us the same thing.”
“What other angel?” Zane asked.
“The one who helped me,” she said and put her hands on her stomach.
The man in the chair looked at her, then back at the woman in the bed.
“Pregnancy is a life-and-death kind of thing,” Zane said. “I didn’t think that was possible.” It wasn’t supposed to be. That wasn’t how the miracles worked. Not that Zane had ever heard of, anyway.
“I didn’t think so, either,” the woman said. “But I had to try. She said it wouldn’t matter in the end.”
Zane looked at the woman’s swollen stomach. He wondered what it meant.
“Maybe you know her,” the woman said. She took her purse from the table and rooted around in it for a few seconds, then pulled out a phone in a flip case. She opened the case to reveal a photo of another woman with her hands on the pregnant woman’s stomach. It was taken before the pregnant woman was pregnant.
Zane stared at the photo. He recognized the angel in it.
“I keep her here to remind me of what’s possible,” the pregnant woman said. “I mean, it took a few years, so at first I thought it hadn’t worked. But now look at me.”
The man in the chair looked at her again and didn’t look away this time.
“How did you find her?” Zane asked. He knew the other angel didn’t have a Craigslist ad like him. He’d looked for one many times and never found anything.
“Our priest knows her,” the pregnant woman said. “We told him about our troubles and one day she was just sitting there in the pews after Mass.”
Zane turned his gaze back to the woman in the bed. It was all there in the room: birth, life, death. And the angel.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
The pregnant woman stepped to the edge of the bed and took one of the other woman’s hands in hers. It looked like she was lifting a stick.
“She’s never seen the baby,” she said. “She doesn’t even know I’m pregnant. She’s been asleep for months. I ... we want her to wake up. Just long enough to see.”
The man in the chair closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.
Zane nodded and put his hand on the woman’s shape under the blanket. He kept it there until he heard the sound of the miracle. He didn’t know how to describe it to people. It sounded like the buzz and squawk of the old modems they used back at the start of the computer days, only the electronic sounds were made by a chorus of human voices. The sound moved through him and then was gone. He pulled his hand back from the woman and nodded again.
“What do you want?” the pregnant woman asked, and Zane knew she meant payment. Nobody was ever really comfortable talking about it. Even Zane didn’t like to talk about it sometimes.
“Just tell me how to find your priest,” Zane said.
The pregnant woman tapped out something quickly on her phone and Zane felt his phone vibrate in his pocket when the message arrived. He didn’t look at it.
When the woman in the bed opened her eyes, Zane turned and left without another word.
The man in the cafeteria was still sitting there when Zane went back out into the lobby. The woman at the reception desk watched him go. It took him three tries to start the car, which wasn’t bad. He thought about driving home and pouring himself a drink, but he went to find the priest instead.
* * *
ZANE MET the angel Agnes Bath when she fell onto his car from an overpass.
He was driving his Corolla on the highway when the world suddenly split into pieces in front of him with a bang that he felt throughout his body. It took him a second to understand the world hadn’t come apart, that it was just his windshield cracking in several places. It took him another second to realize the cracks had been caused by the woman who had smashed down into the hood, as if she had fallen from the sky, although he thought right after that she must have fallen from the overpass he had just driven under.
He pulled over to the side of the road immediately, and by some small miracle all the other cars on the highway managed to avoid him. It was only when he put the car into park that he started to shake.
“God!” he said. “Jesus!”
That was when the woman on his hood sat up and looked at him through his cracked windshield. For some reason, she smiled despite the fact she must have been broken on the inside. He thought maybe she was a homeless woman or a junkie who had been trying to commit suicide even though she was wearing what looked like work clothes: a suit and a blouse, which was torn, presumably from the impact.
Zane got out of the car and reached for her, then held back. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do here. Would he injure her more if he moved her? He thought there was something about spinal cords or necks or something he had to be careful about. He wasn’t sure what his insurance covered.
“What can I do to help you?” he asked her, because he couldn’t think of what else to say.
“You already have,” she said. She reached out and took his hand. And that was the first time he heard the choir inside him.
It wasn’t like it was now. There wasn’t the shriek of voices that accompanied the miracles. It was more like a low hum that suddenly filled his body. He looked around, wondering where the sound was coming from, but didn’t see any other people. There was just passing cars.
“I’m Agnes,” the woman said, shaking his hand. “Agnes Bath.”
“I’m Zane,” Zane said, looking behind him to try to see who or what was causing the hum.
“I’m sorry, Zane,” Agnes said. “I want you to know that. I’m truly sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Zane asked. But Agnes had let go of his hand and was sliding off the hood of the car, leaving a dent behind in the shape of a body, arms outspread like sweeping wings. She walked away from him, along the shoulder of the highway. She lifted her hands up to the sky as she went and laughed.
“You’re probably not all right,” Zane called after her.
“I’ve never been better,” she called back.
He looked at his damaged car. “Who’s going to pay for this?” he asked, but there was no one to hear him.
The humming continued after he had driven home and poured himself a drink to stop the
shaking. It was only in the silence of his apartment that he realized the sound was coming from inside of him.
He thought at first that it was just the stress from the accident, that it would fade with time like the shaking. But instead it kept growing. Then a low vibration joined the humming. He had a feeling like something was building inside of him wherever he went – the grocery store, the employment office, the community police office to report the incident with Agnes, where the cop he talked to nodded as he listened but didn’t write anything down. It was as if there was something inside him he didn’t understand that was trying to explode, in ways he didn’t understand. He couldn’t sleep at night, and he couldn’t think of anything else but how to make it stop. It was like puberty all over again. He needed some sort of release but he had no idea how to achieve it.
He drove back to the scene of the accident to try to understand. He parked on the shoulder right before the overpass and looked up at it, then at the grey sky beyond. There was a lone red helium balloon floating high overhead, but he wasn’t sure if it was a sign of anything or not. He got out of the Corolla and looked in the weeds growing at the side of the road, like there might be some clue there.
When Zane looked back at the road, a traffic jam had somehow formed in seconds. There were lines of cars ahead of him and behind him, filling the lanes. The cars stretched away in both directions as far as he could see. People sat in their cars and stared straight ahead or talked to themselves or shook their heads or swore or did the things you do when stuck in traffic.
Except for the man in the car beside Zane. He rolled down his window while still looking straight ahead.
“Do you know what’s happening?” he asked.
Zane shook his head. “I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t.”
“I would give anything for a way through this,” the man said, still not looking at Zane.
And that was when it happened.
The humming inside Zane suddenly swelled into the shrieking chorus of voices that he would learn to associate with the miracles. The pressure inside him suddenly broke, and he felt a great release, as if something he couldn’t see was flowing out of him and into the road.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 2
