A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  Nothing happened.

  Nobody even looked up from their computers. Jim Bridgeman was typing intently.

  I pried the dial and casing off with the metal ruler and stuck them into my coat pocket, bent the metal nub back so it couldn’t be moved, and walked back out to the stairwell.

  And now, please let it warm up fast enough to work before everybody goes home, I thought, clattering down the stairs to fourth. Let everybody start sweating and take off their hats. Let the aliens be light-sensitive. Let them not be telepathic.

  I jammed the thermostats on fourth and third, and clattered down to second. Our thermostat was on the far side, next to Hunziger’s office. I grabbed up a stack of memos from my desk, walked purposefully across the floor, dismantled the thermostat, and started back toward the stairs.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Solveig said, planting herself firmly in front of me.

  “To a meeting,” I said, trying not to look as lame and frightened as the hero’s girlfriend in the movies always did. She looked down at my sneakers. “Across town.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said weakly.

  “Because I’ve got to show you what I bought Jane for Christmas.”

  She reached for a shopping bag under her desk. “I know I’m not due till May, but I couldn’t resist this,” she said, rummaging in the bag. “It is so cute!”

  She pulled out a tiny pink bonnet with white daisies on it. “Isn’t it adorable?” she said. “It’s newborn size. She can wear it home from the hospital. Oh, and I got her the cutest—”

  “I lied,” I said, and Solveig looked up alertly. “Don’t tell anybody, but I completely forgot to buy a Secret Santa gift. Penny’ll kill me if she finds out. If anybody asks where I’ve gone, tell them the ladies’ room,” I said, and took off down to first.

  The thermostat was right by the door. I disabled it and the one in the basement, got my car (looking in the backseat first, unlike the people in the movies) and drove to the courthouse and the hospital and McDonald’s, and then called my mother and invited myself to dinner. “I’ll bring dessert,” I said. I drove out to the mall, and hit the bakery, the Gap, the video-rental place, and the theater multiplex on the way.

  Mom didn’t have the TV on. She did have the hat on that Sueann had given her. “Don’t you think it’s adorable?” she said.

  “I brought cheesecake,” I said. “Have you heard from Allison and Mitch? How’s Dakota?”

  “Worse,” she said. “She has these swellings on her knees and ankles. The doctors don’t know what’s causing them.” She took the cheesecake into the kitchen, limping slightly. “I’m so worried.”

  I turned up the thermostats in the living room and the bedroom and was plugging the space heater in when she brought in the soup. “I got chilled on the way over,” I said, turning the space heater up to high. “It’s freezing out. I think it’s going to snow.”

  We ate our soup, and Mom told me about Sueann’s wedding. “She wants you to be her maid of honor,” she said, fanning herself. “Aren’t you warm yet?”

  “No,” I said, rubbing my arms.

  “I’ll get you a sweater,” she said, and went into the bedroom, turning the space heater off as she went.

  I turned it back on and went into the living room to build a fire in the fireplace.

  “Have you met anyone at work lately?” she called in from the bedroom.

  “What?” I said, sitting back on my knees.

  She came back in without the sweater. Her hat was gone, and her hair was mussed up, as if something had thrashed around in it. “I hope you’re not still refusing to write a Christmas newsletter,” she said, going into the kitchen and coming out again with two plates of cheesecake. “Come sit down and eat your dessert,” she said.

  I did, still watching her warily.

  “Making up things!” she said. “What an idea! Aunt Margaret wrote me just the other day to tell me how much she loves hearing from you girls and how interesting your newsletters always are.” She cleared the table. “You can stay for a while, can’t you? I hate waiting here alone for news about Dakota.”

  “No, I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up. “I’ve got to…”

  I’ve got to…what? I thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Fly to Spokane? And then, as soon as Dakota was okay, fly back and run wildly around town turning up thermostats until I fell over from exhaustion? And then what? It was when people fell asleep in the movies that the aliens took them over. And there was no way I could stay awake until every parasite was exposed to the heat, even if they didn’t catch me and turn me into one of them. Even if I didn’t turn my ankle.

  The phone rang.

  “Tell them I’m not here,” I said.

  “Who?” Mom asked, picking it up. “Oh, dear, I hope it’s not Mitch with bad news. Hello?” Pause. “It’s Sueann,” she said, putting her hand over the receiver, and listened for a long interval. “She broke up with her boyfriend.”

  “With David?” I said. “Give me the phone.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t here,” she said, handing the phone over.

  “Sueann?” I said. “Why did you break up with David?”

  “Because he’s so deadly dull,” she said. “He’s always calling me and sending me flowers and being nice. He even wants to get married. And tonight at dinner, I just thought, ‘Why am I dating him?’ and we broke up.”

  Mom went over and turned on the TV. “In local news,” the CNN guy said, “special-interest groups banded together to donate fifteen thousand dollars to City Hall’s Christmas display.”

  “Where were you having dinner?” I asked Sueann. “At McDonald’s?”

  “No, at this pizza place, which is another thing. All he ever wants is to go to dinner or the movies. We never do anything interesting.”

  “Did you go to a movie tonight?” She might have been in the multiplex at the mall.

  “No. I told you, I broke up with him.”

  This made no sense. I hadn’t hit any pizza places.

  “Weather is next,” the guy on CNN said.

  “Mom, can you turn that down?” I said. “Sueann, this is important. Tell me what you’re wearing.”

  “Jeans and my blue top and my zodiac necklace. What does that have to do with my breaking up with David?”

  “Are you wearing a hat?”

  “In our forecast just ahead,” the CNN guy said, “great weather for all you people trying to get your Christmas shopping d—”

  Mom turned the TV down.

  “Mom, turn it back up,” I said, motioning wildly.

  “No, I’m not wearing a hat,” Sueann said. “What does that have to do with whether I broke up with David or not?”

  The weather map behind the CNN guy was covered with 62, 65, 70, 68. “Mom,” I said.

  She fumbled with the remote.

  “You won’t believe what he did the other day,” Sueann said, outraged. “Gave me an engagement ring! Can you imag—”

  “—unseasonably warm temperatures and lots of sunshine,” the weather guy blared out. “Continuing right through Christmas.”

  “I mean, what was I thinking?” Sueann said.

  “Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to listen to the weather.”

  “It’s supposed to be nice all next week,” Mom said.

  It was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. “The doctors don’t know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it’s completely gone. She’s back taking ice-skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I’m signing both girls up for Junior Band.”

  “You did the right thing,” Gary said grudgingly. “Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.”

  “The reconciliation’s off, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I haven’t given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still th
ere, if I can only reach it.”

  All it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer space to make her seem even marginally human, but I didn’t say so.

  “I’ve talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,” he said. “You were right not to trust me, either. That’s the mistake they always make in those body-snatcher movies, trusting people.”

  Well, yes and no. If I’d trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn’t have had to do all those thermostats alone.

  “You were the one who turned the heat up at the pizza place where Sueann and her fiancé were having dinner,” I said after Jim told me he’d figured out what the aliens’ weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. “You were the one who’d checked out Attack of the Soul Killers.”

  “I tried to talk to you,” he said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn’t want you to see my bald spot.”

  “You can’t go by appearances,” I said.

  By December fifteenth, hat sales were down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus’s wearing fur, and Gary’s wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him.

  It’s now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. Nobody at work’s wearing a hat except Jim, Solveig’s naming her baby Durango, Hunziger’s suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who’s a terrorist, and to ask me if I’d sent out my Christmas newsletters yet. And had I met anyone lately at work.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m bringing him to Christmas dinner.”

  Yesterday Betty Holland filed a sexual harassment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under the mistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.

  And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.

  Whether it’s true or not.

  Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

  Nan Johnson

  A little after three, it began to snow. It had looked like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead grass on the median and getting thicker as he drove west.

  And this is what you get for setting out in the middle of January, he thought, without checking the Weather Channel first. He hadn’t checked anything. He had taken off his robe, packed a bag, gotten into his car, and taken off. Like a man fleeing a crime.

  The congregation will think I’ve absconded with the money in the collection plate, he thought. Or worse. Hadn’t there been a minister in the paper last month who’d run off to the Bahamas with the building fund and a blonde? They’ll say, “I thought he acted strange in church this morning.”

  But they wouldn’t know yet that he was gone. The Sunday night Mariners’ Meeting had been canceled, the elders’ meeting wasn’t till next week, and the interchurch ecumenical meeting wasn’t till Thursday.

  He was supposed to play chess with B.T. on Wednesday, but he could call him and move it. He would have to call when B.T. was at work and leave him a message on his voice mail. He couldn’t risk talking to him—they had been friends too many years. B.T. would instantly know something was up. And he would be the last person to understand.

  I’ll call his voice mail and move our chess game to Thursday night after the ecumenical meeting, Mel thought. That will give me till Thursday.

  He was kidding himself. The church secretary, Mrs. Bilderbeck, would miss him Monday morning when he didn’t show up in the church office.

  I’ll call her and tell her I’ve got the flu, he thought. No, she would insist on bringing him over chicken soup and zinc lozenges. I’ll tell her I’ve been called out of town for a few days on personal business.

  She will immediately think the worst, he thought. She’ll think I have cancer, or that I’m looking at another church. And anything they conclude, even embezzlement, will be easier for them to accept than the truth.

  The snow was starting to stick on the highway, and the windshield was beginning to fog up. Mel turned on the defroster. A truck passed him, throwing up snow. It was full of gold-and-white Ferris wheel baskets. He had been seeing trucks like it all afternoon, carrying black Octopus cars and concession stands and lengths of roller-coaster track. He wondered what a carnival was doing in Ohio in the middle of January. And in this weather.

  Maybe they were lost. Or maybe they suddenly had a vision telling them to head west, he thought grimly. Maybe they suddenly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of church. In the middle of their sermon.

  He had scared the choir half to death. They had been sitting there, midway through the sermon, thinking they had plenty of time before they had to find the recessional hymn, when he’d stopped cold, his hand still raised, in the middle of a sentence.

  There had been silence for a full minute before the organist thought to play the intro, and then a frantic scramble for their bulletins and their hymnals, a frantic flipping of pages. They had straggled unevenly to their feet all the way through the first verse, singing and looking at him like he was crazy.

  And were they right? Had he really had a vision or was it some kind of midlife crisis? Or psychotic episode?

  He was a Presbyterian, not a Pentecostal. He did not have visions. The only time he had experienced anything remotely like this was when he was nineteen, and that hadn’t been a vision. It had been a call to the ministry, and it had only sent him to seminary, not haring off to who knows where.

  And this wasn’t a vision, either. He hadn’t seen a burning bush or an angel. He hadn’t seen anything. He had simply had an overwhelming conviction that what he was saying was true.

  He wished he still had it, that he wasn’t beginning to doubt it now that he was three hundred miles from home and in the middle of a snowstorm, that he wasn’t beginning to think it had been some kind of self-induced hysteria, born out of his own wishful thinking and the fact that it was January.

  He hated January. The church always looked cheerless and abandoned, with all the Christmas decorations taken down, the sanctuary dim and chilly in the gray winter light, Epiphany over and nothing to look forward to but Lent and taxes. And Good Friday. Attendance and the collection down, half the congregation out with the flu and the other half away on a winter cruise, those who were there looking abandoned, too, and like they wished they had somewhere to go.

  That was why he had decided against his sermon on Christian duty and pulled an old one out of the files, a sermon on Jesus’s promise that He would return. To get that abandoned look off their faces.

  “This is the hardest time,” he had said, “when Christmas is over, and the bills have all come due, and it seems like winter is never going to end and summer is never going to come. But Christ tells us that we ‘know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning,’ and when he comes, we must be ready for him. He may come tomorrow or next year or a thousand years from now. He may already be here, right now. At this moment…”

  And as he said it, he had had an overwhelming feeling that it was true, that He had already come, and he must go find Him.

  But now he wondered if it was just the desire to be somewhere else, too, somewhere besides the cold, poinsettia-less sanctuary.

  If so, you came the wrong way, he thought. It was freezing, and the windshield was starting to fog up. Mel kicked the defroster all the way up to high and swiped at the windshield with his gloved hand.

  The snow was coming down much harder, and the wind was picking up. Mel switched on the radio to hear a weather report.

  “…and in the last days, the Book of Revelation tells us,” a voice said, “ ‘there will be hail and fire mingled
with blood.’ ”

  He hoped that wasn’t the weather report. He hit the scan button on the radio and listened as it cycled through the stations: …“latest on the scandal involving the President and”…the voice of Randy Travis, singing “Forever and Ever, Amen”…“hog futures at”…“and the disciples said, ‘Lord, show us a sign….’ ”

  A sign, that was what he needed, Mel thought, peering at the road. A sign that he was not crazy.

  A semi roared past in a blinding blast of snow and exhaust. He leaned forward, trying to see the lines on the pavement, and another truck went by, full of orange-and-yellow bumper cars. Bumper cars. How appropriate. They were all going to be driving bumper cars if this snow kept up, Mel thought, watching the truck pull into the lane ahead of him. It fishtailed wildly as it did, and Mel put his foot on the brake, felt it skid, and lifted his foot off.

  Well, he had asked for a sign, he thought, carefully slowing down, and this one couldn’t be clearer if it was written in fiery letters: Go home! This was a crazy idea! You’re going to be killed, and then what will the congregation think? Go home!

  Which was easier said than done. He could scarcely see the road, let alone any exit signs, and the windshield was starting to ice up. He swiped at the window again.

  He didn’t dare pull over and stop—those semis would never see him—but he was going to have to. The defroster wasn’t having any effect on the ice on the windshield, and neither were the windshield wipers.

  He rolled down the window and leaned out, trying to grab the wiper and slap it against the windshield to shake the ice off. Snow stabbed his face, stinging it.

  “All right, all right,” he shouted into the wind. “I get the message!”

  He rolled the window back up, shivering, and swiped at the inside of the windshield again. The only kind of sign he wanted now was an exit sign, but he couldn’t see the side of the road.

  If I’m on the road, he thought, trying to spot the shoulder, a telltale outline, but the whole world had disappeared into a featureless whiteness. And what would keep him from driving right off the road and into a ditch?