A Voice In The Night

by Brian Matthews

“And you say the time is near?”

  “It is very close now.”

  “How will we know?”

  “Because I will return.”

  Luke and Jake locked eyes. The visitor was gone. The air was dead. Jake broke the silence into Luke’s headset. “That was the big one. Say something. You’re on the radio, man.” Luke clamped his eyes shut to close off the moment, to give himself a place to think. “Please stand by.” It was all he could manage to say.

  “This is The ABC Radio Network coming to you from KOGO in San Diego.” He was vamping for time.

  Jake was on the headset. “Bishop Noonan on line twelve.” Luke punched him on. “Bishop John Noonan of the Diocese of San Diego is on the line. Your eminence, what do you think of what we just heard?”

  “Well, Luke it’s frightening and wonderful at the same time. Did you notice what he said, about the merging of the physical and spiritual?”

  “I guess I didn’t quite get the significance.”

  “This is very different from the traditional teachings. He’s saying that heaven and life as we all know it will become one thing, one plane of existence. It’s a comforting vision, when you think about it.”

  But the vision offered no comfort to many, and the callers were bordering on hysteria through the rest of the night.

  Bishop Noonan could barely make himself heard over the transatlantic line to the Vatican. Hisses and howls of interference frustrated his attempt to report the night’s developments. Finally, Cardinal Guglieamo understood. “Yes John, I’ll go to the Holy Father now. He’ll want to issue a statement in a matter of hours. Thank you, John.”

  The bishop sank back in his chair, choked with disappointment at the matter-of-fact way Guglieamo had received the news. Perhaps he hadn’t understood what he was saying, the joyousness of the announcement. He raced over the conversation again. Then he knew the cardinal had understood. Giuseppe sat staring at the telephone long after the conversation. He ran through the facts carefully, to grasp all the details. But he was oddly troubled by his own emptiness at the news. Was he deadened by decades in the remoteness of the Vatican? Did the coming change diminish his importance? Would religious faith be obsolete?

  His frail hand reached inside the cassock to the small Rosary he now carried in a pocket, the decorative one he had worn for years now stored in a desk drawer. The movement of the beads, the repetition of the prayers, finally filled his emptiness in the waning hours of afternoon. Despite all the years of theology, it all returned to this for him, the simple peasant’s prayers. He rose and headed toward the Papal apartments. He had news to deliver.

  Chapter 13

  Eileen had missed most of the night’s show. She heard the clicks of the security gate opening as the driver brought Luke home to her. “Did you hear? Were you listening?”

  “Not for most of it. I put the baby in to sleep and dozed off myself in the rocker.” She saw it then. He was barely containing his emotions, struggling to hold back something far deeper than he had ever revealed to her. He wrung his hands together to keep them from shaking. He turned away from her and then back, avoiding her eyes. For the first time, she was deeply afraid for him. She led him to the sofa and sat beside him, saying nothing, just holding the material of his shirtsleeve to maintain a light link of contact. She didn’t turn toward him, knowing that if their eyes met now, he would lose the last sinew of control.

  Time passed before she felt it, before actually hearing. Tremors heaved his body silently, then she sensed rather than saw the tears running now from his tightly clenched eyes. In seconds he couldn’t hold it in any longer and stopped trying. He cried and she let him, still fingering his shirtsleeve so he wouldn’t slip away from her, into himself.

  She knew it had passed when he stood and went to the bathroom, returning with the tissue box, grinning his embarrassment and showing that he was all right. He sat next to her again. “I guess all the pressure just got to me there. I’ve been holding it in, and the dam just burst.

  “He says that heaven and Earth will become one thing. That each of us will have our own choice of a perfect existence and that it’s going to happen soon and that he’s coming back.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, like I said, just the tension, I guess. I kinda froze on the air at the time. Jake saved my ass. Kept me going. Told me what to say.”

  “So, I doubt there’ll be radio shows in this new world. That means you’re out of a job?”

  “Fuck – I hope so.” She slipped into his arms and they roared with laughter and relief until Jeremy awoke from the noise.

  Jake was at the typewriter, and Sandy slipped in through the front door. He lightly waved her off, typing furiously. He wasn’t writing as before. The story was writing itself. He was just steering the words onto paper, not thinking, only telling. Style gave way to the simple truth. He had never been happier. She brought more paper, made coffee, slipping about like a spirit in the dim, reflected light of the single gooseneck lamp shining over the typewriter keys. In time he stopped, letting his head fall back against the top of the chair, signaling to her that he was done. She eased behind him and began kneading his shoulders.

  “Jake, I heard everything. Every minute.” He turned to her and just nodded, his way of telling her that he had no doubts.

  “Pretty major shit, huh?”

  “Well I hope you didn’t write it that way. Not exactly the right tone.”

  “Naah. I got it right. But who’s gonna need a book now? We’re all gonna know everything. Who needs to read?”

  She put her face close to his. “The question is, who needs to write? You, I think. Looks to me like your perfect world, huh?”

  “Point taken. That raises a lot of questions when ya think about it. My perfect world may be to do just what I’ve done all along. Maybe a lot of people would make that choice, to stay with the familiar. What about you?”

  “Start a business, even if nobody bought anything. Or maybe everything would be free. Probably play tennis, surf, and always be young and healthy. And I’d be with you.” Jake lowered his chin and peered over his glasses at her. “With me. In a perfect world where you can have anything, you’d want to be with me.”

  “Right.” She shrugged. You’re my guy.”

  She had been debating this with herself since they had met, and more intensely in recent weeks. At first he had been perfectly inappropriate, the kind she could involve herself with, knowing she would never have to make the choice of permanency. He would be easy to leave. Why now, was she so drawn to this unlikely prospect? She knew it was more than his appeal as someone to save – a fix-up project. More than the modest celebrity he had attained. More than his intellect and talent, recently discovered.

  It was that she had told him one day about the man in the car, and about all the others after him. That for a number of years, she had confused sex with love. He had listened, staring benignly out over the ocean before them. When she had finished, they sat quietly. Then he stood and offered his hand in a way that was full of kindness and understanding. They walked along the beach, finally stopping on a spit of sand that curved well out into the bay. He stepped out from shore a couple of feet and turned back toward her, his hands jammed down into the pockets of his shorts.

  “I’ll never tell anybody. It’s just between you and me.” He smiled at her with an affection that made her know he would guard that secret place inside her that nobody else would ever see. She had trusted Jake with the worst of her and it was safe with him.

  Now, as she flipped through the pages he had been typing, she saw something missing.

  “Jake, where are you in all of this? You never talk about how you’re feeling. You need to get that into the story.”

  “It’s hard to talk about, write about now. Maybe later.”

  “What. Tell me.”

  “It’s that I mostly believe all of it, that it’s gonna happen and everything. But there’s a little part of me that thinks we’re bein
g jived. Just an uneasy voice that’s saying, watch out. It could all be a big hoax.”

  “And Luke?”

  “Luke’s a basket case. He doesn’t eat or sleep enough. Maybe he has his little voice too. Otherwise he’d be damn jubilant. He’s pretty religious in a weird way.”

  “Yeah, I get that from listening to him. Not a zealot or anything but you can hear his bias.”

  “Bias plus doubt. No wonder he’s a mess.”

  He sat back at the typewriter and began to tap out the story he had missed. She fixed dinner, trying to be silent in the tiny kitchen. He slipped in, unnoticed, until his arms appeared around her from behind. “I started up with you for some wrong reasons,” he breathed into her hair. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, you started. That’s what matters now. I came after you for the wrong reasons too. So what?”

  “I guess I want you to know that I think of us like, well, like we’re a couple now.” He knew it was inadequate, that she needed to hear something more, that he needed to say more.

  “And?”

  “ I guess I must have fallen in love with you somewhere along the way. Or I’ve started to.”

  “Well, I know that, for God’s sake.” It was her way to make it easier for him. She could feel his arms relax around her. “I love you too Jake. We are a couple.” She turned around within the circle of his arms, and he could see the new happiness in her eyes.

  Chapter 14

  The American Religious Congress had been the first. At a news conference in Manhattan, they “expressed the gravest doubt about the authenticity of predictions made over the air on the ABC network.” Walter Cronkite covered the denunciation as the lead story on the six o’clock news. Luke felt the hollow, sorrowful feeling in his chest, the one that now came with regularity but no predictability. It would usually descend on him for no discernible reason. It could hang there for a day, or dissolve in minutes. It was the central fact of his existence when it came, swallowing everything else in his consciousness. He had come to think of it as an unspecific but profound sadness. And he carried the pain of it alone. How could he explain it to anyone, even Eileen?

  This time it had a reason. There he was the black and white file footage of him on the TV, above Cronkite’s narrative. An interview with Archbishop Sheen followed, offering mild support to the predictions, noting the Vatican’s pronouncements, but acknowledging that The Bishop’s Conference and the normal protocols had been bypassed. “Like the apostles, we must have faith,” the bishop offered, rather unconvincingly. Luke knew it would be a tough night on his show.

  He saw the shift in the crowd’s sentiments as the driver passed through the double security gate at the station. The crazies had emerged from nowhere and they gestured or stared with eyes intense with accusation. “What happened to all the friendlies?” Jake wondered aloud as the limousine passed through the tunnel of angry or sullen faces. Luke slouched back with his hollow sadness welling up higher in his chest, unable to answer.

  The mechanics of getting ready to go on the air now began to fill the hollow space. He pulled on his headset, cleared his throat and drank a slug of his customary Coke to sharpen his voice. Luke checked the log for ads to run and signed the first page. He flipped through the binder of live copy to be read in the first hour. As the news continued on in his headset, he thought how good he had become at all these rituals and his comfort at being on the air. He was more at ease doing this than at living the other parts of his life. Did airline pilots and soldiers feel the same? Surgeons? Lawyers at trial? If the visitor hadn’t come, he and Eileen would be in their own kind of heaven now instead of a life surrounded by chain-link fences and 24-hour security service.

  “This is Luke Trimble, with Voices in The Night from ABC and KOGO, San Diego. As you probably know by now, The American Religious Congress today came out publicly expressing their doubts about what’s been happening here. Let’s talk about that. Our lines are open. Give us a call.”

  The invitation was unnecessary. Already the lines were blinking full.

  “What evidence are they offering one way or the other?”

  “It’s just grandstanding. Who died and left them in charge?”

  “But we can’t get carried away. That’s all they’re really saying.” Four hours later the score between believers and skeptics was about even. Luke’s head throbbed as he wrapped up the headset cord and cleared the studio for the all-night man. Barry Hall slid into the studio chair as Luke signed off the station log. It was a practiced move they wordlessly executed every night. Barry cued up a couple of records on the turntables, and loaded commercials into the tape decks. There was no Jake to engineer the overnight show. “How ya doin’? Barry looked him directly in the eyes. It was a worried look.

  “Hangin’ in there, I guess. Many crazies when you came in?”

  “Nah. Pretty quiet. I guess they have to sleep too. But, the weather is really weird out there.” Just then the newscast wrapped up with the standard San Diego forecast. Clear tonight, sunny and 70 tomorrow.

  “Weird weather?”

  “Well, maybe it’s just the moonlight or the sky or something. Just different.”

  Luke sensed it instantly as he slipped out the back door, Jake right behind. “Fa-uck., Jake intoned looking skyward. Luke felt the hair on his arms stand up and the adrenaline hit was right behind. It wasn’t weather, or moonlight or the sky. This was a new something, a new atmosphere, a plasma or energy that hovered a few thousand feet above.

  “Eastern 106, descend to 25,000. Hold course at 315” Captain Bill Flowers muttered his automatic reply to Kansas City control. “Eastern 106 descending to two five zero at 315.” An instant later, they hit something with a violent shaking of the aircraft and bounced up 1000 feet in an instant. Every passenger snapped awake. Two stewardesses sprawled in the aisle. Papers, briefcases and flight bags were everywhere.

  “Kansas City control. This is Eastern 106. We just ran into a thermal layer or something at about 27,000 that rocked us very hard. Do you have any other reports?”

  “Allegheny 315. We’re about 20 miles behind you at 26,000 and there’s huge turbulence that’s slamming us all over the place. Kansas City, request a return to 32,000 to clear this stuff.”

  “Allegheny 315 and Eastern 106, return quickly to 32,000.” Flowers was an 18 year veteran on the transcontinental run, with four years of carrier landings in the South Pacific before that. But this was something outside his experience.

  Jim McGowan punctured the silence. “That didn’t feel like any thermal. Felt more like a mountainside or we nosed down into a runway.” The co-pilot was a gifted, instinctive flier. A ’60s version of Lindberg, he wore a plane like a second skin, felt everything, and adjusted without conscious processing. After only four years with Eastern, he was already respected by the senior pilots, and especially by the mechanics for his ear for engines. He could point out a failure well before it happened. They knew to do a tear-down if McGowan said something sounded wrong.

  “Yeah. But I don’t know what we ran into back there and I didn’t want to get too dramatic on the radio.”

  “Well, we’ve gotta start descending again pretty soon or the folks in the back are gonna have to settle for someplace other than Chicago. And I better go back there and look around.”

  “Okay. Try to look reassuring, huh.” Flowers switched on the passenger intercom and slipped into his practiced captain’s baritone. “Ladies and gentlemen, we hit some pretty fierce turbulence back there a couple of minutes ago, but this is one tough airplane and everything is working fine. Co-pilot McGowan is checking to see that you’re all okay and we’d appreciate it if you’d put your seatbelts on and make them tight in case we hit any more of this chop.

  “We expect to arrive in Chicago in about 55 minutes and we’ll be starting a slow descent in just a few minutes.”

  McGowan saw the blankness in Mary Dalton’s eyes. He’d seen it on combat-weary Marines during the war. She was beyond fear. Ma
ry had been a stew for as long as Captain Flowers had been with the line. Nearing 40, she knew her days in the air were numbered. She’d be asked to retire and a younger girl would be taking her place. As of two minutes ago, that had become an appealing idea.

  “You alright, Mary?”

  “Been better. Lying face down in the aisle is a little rough on the dignity. What happened back there?”

  “I’m not gonna lie to you. We don’t know. And we’re heading down to it again so stay strapped tight into your jump seat and look nonchalant.”

  Jim slid back into the co-pilot seat. “People are pretty shook up back there but nothing’s broke. This plane is such a tank.”

  “Eastern 106 requesting another try for 25,000.”

  “Eastern 106 cleared for 25,000. Come right to three-four five and begin your descent.”

  The passengers felt the airspeed slow and the plane bank right, nosing down almost imperceptibly. Mary Dalton stared back through the passengers at a spot on the back bulkhead. A pasted-on smile was in place to mask thoughts she had never allowed before. What would she feel if they crashed? Would she feel anything, survive the initial impact? She imagined being torn from the seatbelt and hurtling into the far bulkhead, crushed by the deceleration. And burning. Time for an Act of Contrition, she thought, hoping she could remember it all. It had to be a perfect Act, or was it a good Act that was required for forgiveness? Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and . . .

  She snorted a laugh, out loud, and the passengers glared at her, as one. Mary covered her mouth in embarrassment, remembering how her younger sister had always recited that she was partly sorry for her sins until someone pointed out her error just before her confirmation. It fit Maryann perfectly, because she, in fact, was only partly sorry.

  Stop this. Do it right. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended . . .

  Flowers held the controls and McGowan was ready to jump in. The engines sounded perfect. All instruments checked out.