Mercury Rests (12 page)

“We need to find a place to rest,” said Christine. “Someplace out of sight.”

Jacob nodded. “There are some hotels up ahead. I think the Ritz-Carlton is up here somewhere.”

“Do you have any money?” Christine asked.

Jacob shook his head grimly. Daltrey had taken his wallet, as well as Christine’s purse and both of their cell phones. Christine felt in her pocket, pulling out a few crumpled bills and some change.

“Seven dollars and thirty-six cents,” she said. “Too bad the Ritz-Carlton isn’t a Motel 6. And it’s not 1962.”

“Maybe they’ll let us rest in the lobby for a bit,” Jacob suggested.

They trudged down the street in the direction of the Ritz.

Christine was jolted out of her reverie by the strident hiccup of a siren behind her, the sound that a squad car makes when the polyester-clad misanthrope behind the wheel wants to remind pedestrians who’s boss. Christine and Jacob were suddenly bathed in harsh white light. Glancing over her shoulder, Christine judged that the car was maybe fifty feet away.

“This way!” whispered Jacob, tugging on Christine’s sleeve. He took off down an alley between a 7-Eleven and a Taco Bell. The police car halted at the curb in front of the alley, its spotlight throwing long shadows ahead of them. Behind them they heard the squawking of police radio but no footsteps. The cop wasn’t chasing them.

That didn’t mean much, of course. These days, cops don’t do much chasing, either by car or on foot. Chasing is strenuous and dangerous work. Everybody knows that car chases are dangerous, of course, but people often unfairly discount the pitfalls of an old-fashioned foot chase. You could trip over something, or get shot at, or get hit in the face with a two-by-four. Your car could get broken into or stolen while you’re out pursuing justice the old-fashioned way. And that’s not even to mention the ever-present threat of pulling a hamstring. Even the most robust agent of the law was at risk for a pulled hamstring when breaking into a sprint after sitting behind the wheel of a squad car for six hours. Much is made of the long arm of the law, but its Achilles’ heel is insufficiently limber hamstrings.

What modern police forces lack in tendonal pliancy, though, they make up for in numbers and good use of controlled bursts of radiation. The officer who declined to chase Christine and Jacob, for instance, was instead transmitting a burst of radiation that was the analog equivalent of the phrase
Two fugitives heading north on foot in an alley off K Street, between Twenty-First and Twenty-Second. Caucasian female and an African American male. May be armed. Request backup.

This message was received by another police car, and as a result, by the time Christine and Jacob emerged from the alley onto L Street, that police car was lying in wait for them at the end of the street. “You two, stop right there!” called an amplified voice.

“This way!” Jacob urged again, leading Christine into the middle of the street. Tires screeched and horns blared. Christine was too frazzled and worn down to fully appreciate the danger of their situation, her awareness lost in a myriad of glaring lights and loud noises. It was all she could do to keep Jacob in sight and follow numbly after him. He darted down another alley, and Christine followed. Twenty seconds later they emerged in the parking lot of a Best Western. Yet another police car was pulling into the lot, maybe a hundred yards away. It stopped just inside, shining its spotlight around the lot. Christine and Jacob ducked behind a nearby minivan.

They were fenced in. The only ways out were past the police car at the exit or back through the alley they had just come through. Very soon, more police cars would arrive. The police would form a perimeter and execute a thorough search of the area. There was no escape.

“Hey,” said Jacob, pointing to something in the distance. “Isn’t that Harry Giddings’s organization?”

Christine looked where he was pointing. Behind the hotel, a bus pulled up that bore the unmistakable
CH
of her late boss’s grassroots evangelical organization known as the Covenant Holders.

“Damn it,” moaned Christine.

“What?” asked Jacob. “I thought you worked for Harry. Maybe these folks can help us.”

“Ugh,” said Christine ambivalently. When Harry was alive, Christine hated relying on his largesse, and she had always vaguely looked down on the Covenant Holders, thinking of them as mindless sheep. The last thing she wanted was to beg them for help. She imagined Harry looking down on her from Heaven and laughing.

“I don’t think we have much choice,” said Jacob. “It looks like they’re about to pull out. If we can get on that bus, we might be able to slip out of here before the trap closes.”

Too exhausted to fight, Christine mumbled assent, and they made their way across the parking lot, sprinting from car to car while the spotlight was pointed in another direction. Finally they reached the bus and made their way as nonchalantly as possible through the assembled Covenant Holders loading up their luggage and sipping at Styrofoam cups of coffee in the wee morning hours.

No begging turned out to be necessary. Christine and Jacob presented themselves as tourists from Los Angeles who had been mugged, and the Covenant Holders practically tripped over each other offering them aid. Several of them even made the point of mentioning what an “attractive couple” they were—which Christine belatedly realized was a reference to Jacob being black. It was like they expected to get extra righteousness points for overlooking
the fact that they were a “mixed couple.” Christine was too tired to make an issue of it.

The group had traveled from Los Angeles to Washington to meet with President Babcock about the Anaheim Event. Many of them had lost friends and family members in the mysterious implosion of Anaheim Stadium, and they had been invited to the White House for a special ceremony. Now they were packing up for their trip home. They seemed oddly upbeat, considering the somber purpose of their trip.

“We’ve got plenty of room, if you want to ride back with us,” said a young man named Gary, who was evidently a youth pastor at a church in Glendale. Christine and Jacob anxiously agreed. Jacob had no particular reason to go to Los Angeles, but he certainly couldn’t stay in DC.

The bus pulled out not five minutes later, passing several more police cars on the way in. Christine smiled as she watched police officers erecting a cordon behind them. “Somebody must be looking out for us,” she said, turning to Jacob across the aisle.

Jacob grunted noncommittally.

“You OK?” asked Christine.

“Fine,” said Jacob. But he seemed to be slipping back into his pre-escape trance.

“Seriously,” Christine went on, trying to prod him out of his funk. “It’s a miracle we got out of there. I mean, what are the odds...”

“One in one,” Jacob muttered.

“What?”

“The odds of what has already happened having happened are always one in one. One hundred percent.”

“That’s dumb,” replied Christine.

Jacob shrugged.

“You’re saying that we were bound to escape, no matter what we did?”

“I’m saying that what happened happened and that it’s pointless to talk about probability in that context.”

“So you never look back on something that just happened and think, ‘Wow, that was really strange. I didn’t expect that to happen’?”

“Of course some events are unexpected,” Jacob answered tiredly. “And if you compare similar situations, there are going to be outliers. That is, in some cases, events are going to occur that appear out of the norm. But the fact is that every situation is unique, and that unusual events are expected to occur occasionally, as part of a long-term distribution pattern. You just happen to notice the unusual events, because they are unusual.”

“Unusual,” repeated Christine. “You mean like someone flying into outer space and imploding the moon with a glass apple?”

“That was an atypical scenario,” said Jacob, in what Christine thought was a solid candidate for Biggest Understatement of All Time. “I will grant you that there were some natural forces at work there that I don’t fully comprehend.”

“What makes you think they were
natural
forces?” Christine asked. “What qualifies as
super
natural in your book?”

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as supernatural forces,” answered Jacob. “More precisely, I don’t think
supernatural
is a useful term. When you say something is supernatural, what you’re really saying is that it’s
un
natural, which is a negative definition. It’s basically saying that there is a class of phenomena that we understand, which we call
natural
phenomena, and then there’s a class of stuff that we don’t understand, which we call
supernatural
.
So when you say something is supernatural, all you’re really saying is that you don’t understand it. And that’s not a property of the phenomenon; it’s a property of the observer of the phenomenon. In other words, a television set would be supernatural to a Neanderthal, because television falls outside of the Neanderthal’s understanding of what is natural. But you and I know there is nothing supernatural about television. A smart Neanderthal would classify television as something that he doesn’t understand, not as something that is intrinsically inexplicable—that is, not something that’s supernatural.” Jacob’s eyes drooped as he talked. His speech had become almost robotic; he seemed to be lulling himself to sleep with his own postulating.

“So you think Mercury flew to the moon with some kind of invisible jetpack? Some sort of technological innovation that the angels haven’t shared with humans?”

“I’m sure it’s not that simple,” said Jacob, yawning widely. “But yes, I think there is some sort of natural explanation. As Arthur C. Clarke said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Maybe these so-called angels are more technologically advanced than we are. Or maybe their technology has simply advanced in a different direction than ours.”

“
So-called
angels?” asked Christine. “You don’t think those were angels in Kenya? You don’t believe that Mercury and Michelle and the lot are angels?”

Jacob shrugged. “I don’t know what they are. But
angel
is a word with supernatural connotations. Using a word like that indicates that you’ve given up trying to understand them. That they are somehow beyond the realm of human understanding, which I don’t buy. I’m going to get some sleep.”

With that, he curled up on the seat and closed his eyes.

“You know what I think?” asked Christine. “I think that refusing to use a word says just as much about someone’s biases as using the word.”

Jacob didn’t respond. Within a minute, he was snoring.

Christine sighed and lay down in her own seat, using her wadded-up shirt as a pillow. She felt too wound up to sleep but was powerless against the comforting hum of the diesel engine reverberating through the bus.

“So what did Elihu say to you?” Mercury asked.

“Basically,” said Job, “he told me that I was looking at things all wrong. It’s kind of an obvious point in retrospect, but he helped me understand that everything isn’t about me.”

“Huh?” asked Mercury dimly.

“I was looking at it like, ‘Why is this happening to me? What did I do wrong? How do I fix it?’ But that’s a dead-end way of thinking. I mean, self-reflection is all well and good, but ultimately you have to accept that there are going to be some things that you’re never going to understand. If you insist that things make sense from your own finite, selfish perspective, you’re never going to be happy. I accepted that there is a God who is running things, and that everything that was happening to me happened for a reason, even if I wasn’t privy to what that reason was.”

“Mystical mumbo jumbo,” murmured Cain. Mercury and Job ignored him.

“So you never did curse God?” Mercury asked.

Job shook his head. “Haven’t you read the Bible? There’s a whole book about me.”

“Yeah, but you know how people exaggerate. Like how Goliath wasn’t really nine feet tall.”

“Nine and a half,” said Cain.

Job nodded.

Mercury looked from Job to Cain and back again. “Goliath was
not
nine and a half feet tall.”

“Were you there?” asked Job.

“No, but...the tallest man on record was less than nine feet tall. The human frame simply can’t support—”

“Crippling back problems,” said Job. “He wasn’t really a bad guy, but what are you going to do when you’re the world’s tallest man and you have the bad luck to be born a Philistine? They made him their champion. He had no choice. He was miserable. Could barely walk in that armor, much less fight anyone. I understand he leaned into that pebble. Poor guy.”

“Forget I said anything,” said Mercury.

“They fudged the ending of my story a bit,” said Job. “I guess Heaven felt pretty bad about screwing me over, so they gave me eternal life. Well, technically they gave me ten thousand years, I guess. They sent an angel to explain it, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“How long has it been?” asked Mercury.

“Hmm,” replied Job. “Must be getting close.”

“How can you not know?” asked Mercury.

“I don’t count the days,” said Job. “That’s Cain’s gig. I focus on living.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Cain. “I don’t know what year he was born. We didn’t meet until he was already a few hundred years old. My best guess is that it’s been around nine thousand, nine hundred years, give or take a century.”

Nearly ten thousand years!
thought Mercury. Most angels weren’t that old. Hell, Mercury wasn’t that old. Well, technically he was probably older, but only if you counted however many centuries had elapsed between the implosion of the moon and his reincorporation here. The number of years that Mercury had actually experienced was around seven thousand, his inception date being roughly 5000 BC. What would it be like to experience ten thousand years trapped on the Mundane Plane? Even the angels, who had the freedom to travel many different planes, tended to get bored after a few thousand years. Job’s life—and Cain’s too—must have been nearly unbearable.