Mercury Falls (2 page)

"But he replied, 'I tell you the truth, I don't know you.'

"Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour."

Christine snorted involuntarily at Prophet Jonas's straight-faced delivery of the closing sentence, and then, sensing eyes upon her, she turned her attention back to finding a six-letter word for "banal."

Prophet Jonas, undeterred at her outburst, set down the Bible and exclaimed, "Behold, the Ten Virgins!"

The crowd clapped politely for the girls, who shivered and smiled weakly.

"Behold!" Jonas exclaimed again. "The Five Wise Virgins!"

The five girls farthest to the left reached down with their left hands and each picked up a one-gallon can of kerosene. Well, except for the girl in the middle, who had a milk jug that had been half-filled with kerosene. The middle Wise Virgin had absentmindedly left her can in Carson City and had to borrow a milk jug and half a gallon of kerosene from one of the other Wise Virgins—a violation of the spirit of the ceremony that did not go unnoticed by Prophet Jonas.

The crowd clapped for the Wise Virgins. "Go, Carly!" yelled Carly's mother through cupped hands, for no apparent reason.

"Behold!" Jonas hollered once more. "The Five Foolish Virgins!"

The five girls on the right looked at their feet, but finding no cans of kerosene there, pantomimed a sort of ditzy disappointment, holding out their free hands as if to say, "Whoops, I am such a Foolish Virgin, forgetting my oil. Whatever shall I do?"

Christine rolled her eyes and glanced at the display of her cell phone. It said 5:23. Twenty-one minutes until she could go home.

Second Prophet Noah Bitters, who was—not coincidentally—First Prophet Jonas's younger, better looking, but less charismatic brother, next led the crowd in quavering renditions of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and (less appropriately) "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore." Christine couldn't help but notice several of the Foolish Virgins jockeying for the Second Prophet's attention.

The songs gave way to an eerie silence. Prophet Jonas, trying to affect a look of confident expectation as he glanced at his watch, gave a brief, halting message, punctuated with pauses to allow for the sudden arrival of the Bridegroom. Finally, having run out of platitudes, he raised his eyes to the heavens and announced, "The wait is over!"

Christine checked her cell phone. It read 5:44 a.m. on the dot. In the east, the first rays of sun shot over the horizon. As more and more of the blazing disc became visible, it became clear that nothing else of note was going to happen.

Christine surveyed the members of the crowd, who were now shielding their eyes against the rising sun and looking expectantly at First Prophet Jonas Bitters. Prophet Jonas, a perplexed expression on his face, looked at the ten girls standing on the ridge just above him. The girls glanced nervously at each other, at Prophet Jonas, and at the crowd composed of their parents, relatives, and friends.

As surely as the great fiery ball itself, a troubling realization began to dawn on the assembled members of the Church of the Bridegroom. Something had gone wrong. But what? Could Prophet Jonas have been mistaken? No, that was inconceivable. Prophet Jonas was their wise and revered leader, infallibly led by the Spirit of God. If he was wrong, then everything they had worked for over the past eighteen years. . .it all meant nothing. No, it was impossible. There had to be another explanation.

As if in response to the collective prayer for some kind of alternate explanation, a shrill voice, apparently belonging to one of the Foolish Virgins, suddenly shrieked, "Carly's not a virgin!"

Gasps went up from the crowd. The other nine Virgins, Foolish and Wise alike, backed away from Carly in apparent horror.

"Carly!" Prophet Jonas croaked. "You've ruined us all!"

Carly, suddenly charged with short-circuiting the arrival of the Messiah, did the only thing she could do: she redirected the blame.

"Rachel's pregnant!" Carly shouted.

Rachel, a fifteen-year-old Foolish Virgin, shot daggers at Carly. "At least I didn't have an
abortion
," she hissed.

"That's a lie!" screamed a Wise Virgin, who realized too late that Rachel hadn't been talking about her.

The ten nominal virgins instantly devolved into a chaotic mass of screams, recriminations, and hair-pulling.

Prophet Jonas, who was secretly relieved to be able to replace his guilt and embarrassment with righteous anger, turned to face the crowd. "You wicked, wicked people!" he hissed. "I ask for ten virgins, and you give to me ten harlots! Ten painted sluts, not fit to be temple whores in Sodom itself! Ten brazen strumpets, hawking their wares in the streets of Babylon! Ten—"

"That's enough," interjected Second Prophet Noah Bitters, who had to admit that he was impressed with the number of synonyms for
prostitute
his brother knew. "There's no need to censure these girls any further. I'm sure their embarrassment is more than enough—"

Prophet Jonas shot an accusatory glare at his brother. "Did you know. . .?" he asked.

Noah Bitters looked shocked. "Did I know? What kind of question is that? I'm your brother, Jonas!" None of these responses, of course, actually answered the question.

"I love you, Noah!" called one of the younger Foolish Virgins from the ridge.

Noah smiled weakly at his brother, whose face went red with rage. Prophet Jonas looked, Christine thought, like a cartoon character who was about to shoot steam from his ears. With Jonas momentarily paralyzed by anger, Noah sprinted off into the desert. A split second later, his brother followed, howling decidedly non-Biblical curses after him.

The members of the congregation muttered to each other. A few of the ostensible virgins' parents marched up the ridge to retrieve their respective daughters. Others simply got in their cars and left. A few lay flat on the ground, pummeling the desert sand with their fists and weeping.

Christine packed up her folding chair, threw it in the trunk of her rented Corolla, and checked her cell phone once more. It was 5:46 a.m. Plenty of time to get to the Salt Lake City airport for the 10:25 flight to Los Angeles.

William Miller, a nineteenth-century Baptist preacher, predicted that Jesus Christ would return sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When March 21, 1844, passed without incident, Miller revised his calculations and adopted a new date: April 18, 1844. Like the previous date, April 18 passed without Christ's return. Miller publicly confessed his error but maintained that "the day of the Lord is near, even at the door."

In August 1844 at a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, one of Miller's followers, Samuel S. Snow, presented his own interpretation: that Christ would return on October 22, 1844. By this time, Miller inexplicably had thousands of followers who were eager recipients of Snow's message.

The sun rose on the morning of October 22 like any other day, and October 22 passed without incident. This nonevent was dubbed by historians the "Great Disappointment."

There had been many disappointments prior to this one, and there have been many more since, but never has there been another Great Disappointment. Even the Great War was demoted to World War I after a second, even bigger war just two decades later, but the Great Disappointment remains a nonevent without sequel, even after a century and a half.
The Godfather III
notwithstanding, that's a big disappointment.

If you were lucky enough to be a journalist covering this nonevent, you could legitimately claim to have been a witness to history. You could regale your grandchildren with stories of the time you had seen nothing happen on a truly mammoth scale. Christine Temetri, however, had the ill fortune to be born over a hundred years too late to cover the Great Disappointment, and as a result had been cursed to cover a series of Mild Disappointments that didn't even really warrant the capital letters. There's something to be said for covering spectacular failures; that was, in fact, what most journalists did most of the time. Covering an endless series of Mild Disappointments, on the other hand, was just demoralizing.

It wasn't that Christine disbelieved in the Apocalypse. She had always sort of believed in it as a concept, the idea that the human race would eventually have to account for its many sins—war, hatred, Michael Bay films—but she couldn't remember a time when she had thought of it as an actual historical
event
.

At some point she must have thought of it as a definite, temporal occurrence, thanks to her Lutheran parents, just as at some point she had believed that Adam and Eve were real live people. But as she had gotten older, the extreme ends of the Bible had begun to fray in her mind. She did her best to hold onto the middle, but Genesis and Revelation were too remote from her own experience to connect to anything concrete. In college she had once read about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and despite the fact that she tended to think of physics as occupying a realm of eclectic trivia that was fundamentally divorced from daily reality—like the rules of tennis or the intricacies of the Electoral College—the idea of certain truths being inherently unknowable resonated with her. These days she tended to think of herself as a Heisenbergian Christian: she believed in the broad outlines of Christianity, but she was unable to pinpoint the specifics of her creed. She was OK with the wave; it was the particles that tended to escape her.

As she drove east across the barren landscape toward Salt Lake City, the latest Mild Disappointment continued to assault her in the form of the blazing sun burning globs of red-hot lava in her field of vision, and it was difficult not to take the harassment personally. "What are you mad at
me
for?" Christine grumbled at the unreasoning sun. "I'm on
your
side." But the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike, and Christine's unwavering faith that the fiery orb would rise that morning was no protection against its blinding rays.

Intentionally driving into a dazzling sunrise was, Christine mused humorlessly, a pretty decent metaphor for how her career as a reporter was going. There was no longer any pretending that her job consisted of anything other than intentionally ignoring the blindingly obvious. Every few weeks she would jet off to some remote yet strangely familiar locale where she would be subjected to a predictable combination of questionable Biblical interpretation, scapegoating of some group or other for the word's travails (most often homosexuals or Muslims, but occasionally Jews or Catholics and, in one case, the infield of the Los Angeles Dodgers), and "continental breakfasts" that seemed to hail from the lost Eighth Continent of Stale Muffins and Under-ripe Cantaloupes. And as the
Banner
's representative, she was expected to act "professional" and take it all seriously, even the obviously inedible melon shavings. She was a jaded veteran being asked to play the wild-eyed amateur ("Gosh, the world is ending
tomorrow
? Well, now I feel a little silly about limiting myself to a single muffin at the motel this morning, heh heh"), and she became a little more jaded with each unremarkable sunrise.

These days she couldn't even justify her job on the basis of the entertainment value she provided to the
Banner
's readers; it was clear that even the most assiduous apocalyptic clock-watchers were getting a little bored with the repetitive nature of her columns. What Harry's motivations were in continuing to assign these stories she couldn't imagine.

As the sun mercifully crept higher in the sky, Christine glanced in the rental car's rearview mirror to get an idea of how badly her appearance had been tarnished by the sleepless night in the desert. Human females are conditioned to base their sense of spiritual well-being on their physical appearance; it was to Christine's credit that she merely hoped that she looked better than she felt. Still, it was ill-advised for her to be checking her appearance in the rearview mirror, and not only for the usual reason that it's a bad idea to use a vital safety feature of a fifteen-hundred-pound, gasoline-powered steel machine for making sure one's eyes aren't noticeably puffy. It was an especially bad idea in this case because people who looked at Christine's face tended to stare at it for a few seconds longer than was appropriate under the circumstances, whatever those circumstances were. Christine herself was not immune to the effect, even when her circumstances required regular scrutiny of her surroundings to ensure that she was still on the appropriate side of the highway.

People found themselves staring at Christine's face for the simple reason that they could not figure out how such an odd combination of features could be arranged in such a pleasing configuration. Her nose was too long and pointed, her eyes were too narrow and far apart, and the lines from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth were too pronounced. Her hair was not quite dark enough to be seductively exotic, nor curly enough to suggest carnal desires bubbling unseen under her overly placid demeanor and slightly uneven complexion.

Despite this, she managed to be strikingly beautiful, in the sort of way that made the beholder believe that he or she was the only person on earth capable of recognizing her beauty underneath those overly aggressive features. Even now, flying obliviously across the desolate landscape of eastern Nevada, she found herself transfixed by her appearance and wondering just what the deal with her face was.

As she was about to veer off the unrelentingly straight highway, her cell phone rang on the seat next to her, and she tore her eyes from the mirror, taking a moment to recalibrate the Corolla's course before picking up the phone. The display read, "Harry."

Christine sighed. Her boss, Harry Giddings, had the irritating habit of sending her across the country on these wild-goose chases and then forgetting where she was and wondering why he hadn't seen her around the office for a few days. Best-case scenario, he had yet another crackpot in mind for her to interview, and it was urgent that she get on the next plane back to Los Angeles—as if maybe she had intended to lollygag around the Salt Lake City airport for a few hours, just for giggles. She tossed the phone back on the passenger's seat. Harry would just have to wait. She had some things to say to him, but not over a cell phone while she was a thousand miles away. He wouldn't be happy about her dodging his call, but he'd get over it. Harry being unhappy wasn't the end of the world.