Kingdom come

The Imperial roof was desert. It was cordoned. Again the Antichrist and his fiancée lay alone within their solarium, sunlight jumping in the jewel-green pool below them. It was morning, and the cedar arbor sighed pleasant creosote around them as it swelled in the rising heat. The hottest December on record had given way to a tropical January never before conceived. Jim Johns, in swim trunks, was not so much bestial as belonging to a hairy ethnicity hairier somewhat than is known to human science. The hair was in human places, at least, regular in length and thickness, nearly opaque. He and Nadyenka sat quietly. Nadyenka was reading Marie Claire.

“So,” said the Man of Sin.

Nadyenka looked over. She smiled.

“So.”

The Antichrist cleared his throat, nodding.

Nadyenka squinted.

“I mean,” Jim Johns continued. “We never talked about it exactly.”

“Whether I’m a Christian?”

Jim Johns coughed. “Whether you’re religious, you know. It may come up.”

“When?”

Nadyenka looked back to Marie Claire. Her tone was flat.

“Tell me why you’re asking.”

The Antichrist shook his head.

“What if I end up in hell, is all I’m saying. I mean, the Bible gets all kinds of details wrong, right? that’s obvious. But if it’s wrong about me, then why do I even exist? Am I figment of the Judeo-Christian imagination or not?”

Nadyenka nodded. “I would say not.”

“Right, I’m pretty sure I exist, but short of a very basic textual problem, I’m damned.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that too,” Nadyenka said. She had been staring at the same words on the same page without comprehension for two minutes.

“You have.”

“Yes.” She turned a page. “I’ll come with, I think.”

“Really?”

“You—” She looked at him. She touched his hand. It felt like that of mammoth, like a hoof. “My life has been mostly shit to this point. You musy the best thing I could ever deserve.”

If she hadn’t said it with such certainty it might not have convinced him and it might not have made her ill. She felt sick with a pang, like she’d taken cyanide salts. But Jim Johns the Antichrist was looking at her deeply, as a connoisseur probing for one distinct, savorable flaw. He was actually wondering was to what degree he had tricked her, and to what degree she was simply damaged goods when he found her.

Nadyenka was wondering roughly the same.

“Wow,” he said.

The word made Nadyenka ill.

**
On January 5, Dyna and Padraig Mitchell were renewing their wedding vows. Thus they had required an institution that would countenance the bond of man and furniture. They found First United Episcopal Church.

“We would be honored,” Bishop Andrew had told them, “to facilitate your worship...”

Bishop Andrew was a bit under-inspiring somehow. But he was genuinely kind, and on account of the looming apocalypse agreed to throwing the ceremony together on incredibly short notices. The Mitchells felt they could not be choosy—

Dyna came to the altar on a four-wheel dolly festooned in white hyacinths. It was drawn by an eight year-old boy and a six year-old girl, a nephew of hers and a second cousin of Padraig’s. They were little tan things, the girl in a nymph-ish coronal of blue and pink and yellow—the boy in black slacks and an absurdly tiny dinner jacket, with the invariable comicness of all male children in grown-up outfits. The bride was draped in a white silk tablecloth of Egyptian cotton, flowers spiraling over each corner, the collar a stiff white ruff. Padraig wore a classic tuxedo, a cummerbund—he had lost four happy pounds in three days.

Bishop Andrew stood before them. He addressed the crowd.

“Dearly beloved, there is no reason any marriage should be possible. It is an irrational commitment, undertaken for reasons too deep and too complex to name.”

Padraig was watching Dyna and Dyna was watching Padraig. They were crazy with devotion. That is what long-term commitment boils down to, Bishop Andrew explained: Metered insanity. They knew what he meant.

“But the old saw holds,” said the bishop. He smiled at man and coffee table. “That we cannot keep one another the same, that we must change together....”

“Dyna,” said Padraig, who was a sucker for wedding vows, who had written several drafts of what he was about to read. “It’s almost a shame that, for me to be married to you...” He faltered. He coughed. “That you have to be married to me.”

Dyna nodded, crying. Most of the assembly was crying. Bishop Andrew was crying. Padraig was trying not to double over.

“I feel the same,” Dyna said.

So he leaned down and they kissed and in the grand illogic of that timeworn sacrament, ambiguities fell useless, like doves over a battlefield.

“Oh,” said Tot Tot Maddock. “Hey, Jim.”

Tot stood speechless for a moment in his ultra-fine silk shorts, his sturdy immigrant gut impending over them. When Tot didn’t move after a moment, the Antichrist merely pushed past. Tot ogled him, presently unable to forge an utterance.

“Wow,” Jim said, “this is swank. This is very nice. You know, I’m still at the Imperial. My room isn’t anything as nice as this.”

The thirty-eighth story suite felt like the inside of a large house, with high ceilings and long windows and unnecessarily wide walkways. They were in the living room, which was adorned here and there with Tot’s dirty laundry, along with an oversized couch, a roll-top desk, an enormous television and sound system, none of which Tot ever utilized. Along one wall there was an untramodern stand-alone fireplace fitted for Tot’s burnt-offering needs with a white porcelain barrel and a sleek chrome ventilator hood.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” Tot said. “I don’t spend as much time here as I’d like, but...” Tot’s substantial black brows went up. “Are you feeling alright, Jim?”

The Antichrist, Man of Sin/Destiny, had opened one of the tall windows and was gazing out in an abstract manner. He swiveled back.

“Wonderful, Tot,” he said. “I’m wonderful.”

“I’m sorry again about your...friend,” Tot said. “I don’t know if that’s the right word.”

“Friend is fine.”

“I didn’t know if you were actually related, or—”

“Cool,” Jim said. “What’s this stuff?”

The Antichrist began examining Tot’s ceremonial objects, which were spread out on the coffee table—a cool gold basin of Easter water, several clusters of jingle bells in different configurations, a tiny fife, a bit of unspun fleece and a small olive oil cruet half full of the raspberry-blue lamb’s blood. A yellow plasma skim floated over its surface.

Jim held up the vessel. “This a religious thing?”

Tot glanced back to the front door, which hung open. He could see where his bodymen, Fitz and Gonzo, sat outside, placid. He turned back to Jim.

“Kind of.”

“Right,” Jim said. “This is Psalm 24. I recognize this stuff.”

Tot laughed. A little.

“Let me see,” Jim continued. “‘He who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and not sworn deceitfully may stand in My holy place.’ That close?”

Tot smiled. “I don’t know.”

At this point the door shut, and when Tot looked over, his big gut quailed. His goons, Fitz Waldo and Albrecto Gonzales, now stood blocking the door, akimbo, their faces empty of expression. It was a look Tot knew. He’d worn it before.

“...Did you know,” Jim was saying, “—somebody was telling me this today. Did you know the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake has its own Holy of Holies? Based on one verse, just the one. They have a little room and an Ark and a whole...” He indicated the ceremonial items. “...Purification ritual and everything. This literal interpretation thing just gets all out of hand, I think.”

Tot looked at the items. For some reason he’d been unable to throw them away. He’d even tried the ablution ritual again after the assassination. It gave him a nauseous migraine.

Tot mustered some attitude. He cleared his throat.

“If you’re having any funny thoughts, Mr. Johns, I understand. I mean, I appreciate your loss and so on.”

Jim Johns nodded, listening.

“Now, I’m not really a big shot or anything, I know that. But I’m thinking, you know—depending on what you’re thinking about right now— if something bad happens to me, sooner or later something bad will almost definitely happen to you.”

Jim continued nodding.

“You and say—” Tot smiled in a helpful manner. “Say, anyone you cared for in particular. Something might happen to them. That’s just an observation, you understand. It’s an irrational time, a lot of ambiguity and that. I understand that you’re upset, I just want to make sure you’re being practical.”

The Antichrist was still nodding. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I appreciate your concern, Tot.” He sighed. “But I think I am being practical.”

At this time a large hand came around Tot’s face and a rolled-up black polyester sock went into Tot’s mouth, which the hand then clamped shut.

“Actually we’re doing a little firebombing today,” said the Antichrist. “Here and in Atlantic City. Detroit, Chicago, Miami....The list goes on.”

Tot’s hands tugged futilely at the grip of Fitz Waldo until they were pulled down by Fitz’s associate, Albrecto Gonzales, who bound them in rubber tape.

“Right....” said Jim Johns. “So I’m not worried about that too much.”

He moved himself to the red leather wingback on the opposite side of the room and flopped down absently. He watched as the spool of sticky black tape went around Tot’s face and nose several times, binding the gag in. Tot’s forced breaths blew little air holes between the bands and they sqealed weakly as he struggled.

The Antichrist trembled a bit, shifting in his seat.

Fitz and Gonzo cleared off the big coffee table, setting the relics aside delicately, with Catholic respect. Then they stretched their former employer out on it, tugging up his shirttails. Jim watched as Fitz tore open a blue and white sterile packet and removed a disposable scalpel, then laid open a long crescent at the base of Tot’s abdomen, which slid apart in a huge smile. Jim saw Tot’s eyes roll all the way back and then return all the way to center, as Gonzales gently retraced his incision with the tiny steel tooth.

Now Gonzales pushed the hide up a little, and trimmed free several feet of small intestine, unlooping it gigerly, hand-over-hand. Fitz took this material and wound it twice around the stand-alone fireplace module on the far wall, just as Gonzo carried the bound, gagging gentleman to the window, shushing him gently, and heaved him with a grunt out in the airy late-morning like a dove. Jim’s eyes snapped shut. He pressed his ear holes closed. He still heard the gut twang snug, anchored on the fireplace that was bolted to wall and floor. He heard the gagging gentleman slap the windows below. He felt the awful dropline give.

He felt fooled. His suit was sweat-soaked. By the time he looked around him again the goons had gone in the bathroom down the hall and Jim Johns could hear them rinsing in the sink and under the bathtub faucet, washing the deed off their hands and upper arms. The front of Gonzo’s silver slacks were soaked-through as Jim pushed by.

He got in front of the toilet, breathless. He heaved once and nothing exited. He heaved again. He felt fooled. He squeezed his eyes closed.

He saw the Deceiver.
Lucas watched cable news.

“Jim Johns,” explained the cable reportrix in raven-red powersuit, “also known as the Antichrist, or “Man of Sin,” proposes a ‘smooth transition’ to Armageddon. He seeks, quote, ‘to gracefully oversee’ our demise. We take you inside, as....”

In a moment the sallow European face of the protégé-Archfiend took the screen. He stood before a podium in an unidentified lounge within the Monte Carlo, palatial with microphones. He coughed.

“We’re screwed—” said the Antichrist. “That’s my platform.” Flashbulbs flashed. Shutters clicked and whirred. “I’ve got the Emperorship,” he said. “All I intend to do with it is facilitate the End. If the Apocalypse is foreordained, let it be painless.”

In his damp hotel room, to whose odors he’d grown inured, Lucas scribbled furiously. He tore up his legal pad, cheeks tingling with oxygen.

“I’m ready to see judgment,” said the Antichrist, shifting on the podium. “Let the forgone conclusion conclude, and we can all go back to what we were doing.” The Antichrist smiled. “We’re screwed,” he said. “That’s my gospel.”

Lucas scrawled. He couldn’t write fast enough. He found an exegetical wedge. He threw together hermeneutics—

“Questions?” said the Antichrist.

A muffled voice came from the unseen gallery, mostly inaudible. About four words were clear.

“...if it’s literal, or...”

The Antichrist nodded, sipping from a water bottle.

“I’ll tell you, Tommy, I just don’t feel like it. I’ve looked at the same pages you have. I’m in John, I’m all over the place in Paul. I’m in Daniel, I may be in Ezekiel, I know, and I’m supposed to have seven heads. I’m supposed to think I’m a God, and I’m supposed to kill people with my breath—”

The Antichrist took another quick suck from the bottle, hot lights sparking off his forehead and sweat-matted hair. He exhaled.

“And I don’t even have bad breath,” he said. “I’m a total flosser.”

He smiled as laughter burst the tense assembly.

“And yet,” he said. “It’s the condition of my existence, you know. What are you gonna do?”

Tommy said something genial, now, to a brief, lesser revival of merriment.

“Yeah, so I don’t know, Tommy,” said the Antichrist. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a late bloomer.”

Laughter orbited. Cameras clicked.

Lucas killed the sound. He looked at what he had written. It was satisfactory.

It began—

CAN’T MEANS I DON’T WANT TO.

Today, in this same area, forces acting on the orders of Jim Johns the Antichrist were raiding the Golden Nugget. Thermite explosives capable of burning through solid steel had been distributed on the gaming floor and the executive floors and among the suites. Presently the excess of incendiary material had created a firestorm inside the casino that would inflict primary structural damage. And thus, in a few moments, and much to the surprise of the Horde members still finishing up inside, the whole great glittering inelegant edifice was going to come down.

Jim Johns was downtown leading his men, conferring with various sub-capos, arbitrating squabbles and so on. No one could satisfactorily explain, however, the improvised carnival of absurdist vehicles outside the district courthouse. The Federal Government had become such a quaint notion in this short time that it shocked you whenever you noticed it. Just then, a young, orange-bearded gentleman had found an open spot in front of the government building and was scuttling up the sidewalk toward its marble steps.

With long strides the Antichrist crossed over and grabbed the young man by the shoulder of his silver two-piece suit. The man spluttered and coughed, catching his glasses.

“Excuse—”

Putting his glasses back, though, he recognized the Man of Sin. And his shock morphed into pleased curiosity. His tone leveled.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Sir.”

“You’re excused,” said the Antichrist. “What’s your name?”

“Keighlis,” the young man said.

The Antichrist looked up at the ovoidally fenestrated, ultra-chrome courthouse above them. He pointed.

“What do you do here?”

Keighlis glanced at the building, and then back to the Antichrist.

“I’m a theologian,” Keighlis said.

“You’re a theologian.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Antichrist let go of his jacket then, like an animal he was not sure the intentions or capabilities of.

“Why is the Federal Government employing theologians?” said the Antichrist.

Keighlis thought about it.

“It’s a fair question,” he said.

“What kind of theologian are you?”

“Kind?”

The Antichrist nodded. “What religion?”

Keighlis pressed on his lips with his index finger.

“I’m an unallied monotheist,” he said finally.

The Antichrist smiled slowly. He nodded.

“I like that,” he said. “Maybe that’s what I am.”

“It’s what I say when I give talks and things.”

The Antichrist nodded. “Are you free tonight?”

Keighlis stood blinking a moment.

“Sure.”

Behind the Antichrist a casino was falling over.

“...And thanks so much,” he was saying. “Thanks for giving us the opportunity to come together and enjoy this wonderful game even when the bombs are dropping somewhere. Thanks for Curtis’ transition play. And Deron’s fall-away jumper.”

The kids smiled at eachother.

“...And Jamal’s anti-perspirant and Alvin’s foot powder.”

The kids laughed. They said Amen. The President handed the ball off to an overweight youngster named Donnell, who was draped in an enormous, red Bulls jersey. In his own mind the President referred to the child as “Murray.” For in the President’s weary nostalgia, they were perfect doubles: the youthy ampleness of chin and jowl, the pivoting walk, the smile, never insincere and never completely devoid of embarrassment.

“Alright—” said the President. “Captains?”

Rico snagged the President after scrimmage. They were in the lobby by the sign-in desk: a clipboard, a folding chair a tri-fold plastic table, a pencil.

“Hey,” Rico said, tossing back his bangs.

“Hey,” said the President.

“We were wondering,” Rico said, “if you’d like to give your testimony tomorrow afternoon.”

The President nodded, then shook his head. “I wouldn’t.”

Rico laughed.

“Do you know what it is?”

The President didn’t say anything at first. “Not really.”

“You tell us about the important things in your life, and what led you where you are, your struggles, then how you found God and so on....”

The President nodded.

“There’s really nothing important in my life,” he said. “I’ve never had struggle to at anything, and I’m only here because I saw a sign by the highway when I was depressed. If this is God, then I’m glad I found him. But I don’t think I really looked.”

Rico smiled.

“Right,” he said. “Like that.”
That night in a quiet Kansas City suburb, Padraig Mitchell carefully papered his living room with newsprint. He ran an ionic air filter for an hour, pulling every possible dust particle out of the air.

The French Polish is a tedious labor of love normally reserved for smaller objects such as jewelry boxes and acoustic guitars. It requires an immaculate environment, careful strokes, interminable repetition, and long inactive drying periods. For Padraig and Dyna of course that was as may be. It was honeymoon. Padraig was taking a can of shellac he had just cut from its warm water bath, when something unexpected happened. As he lifted the aluminum pail up from the no-longer steaming water, he had cleared his throat.

“Baby-bath warm,” he said. “Ready?”

When he said this, Padraig noticed that his R had involunarily r-r-rolled. The room had become silent when he stopped, and he had to shake himself for just a moment to make sure he still existed.

Of less significance was the fact that his hobnailed shop stool had metamorphosed into a green ectoplasmic organism, something like a large prototypical sea anemone. Much stranger was that Dyna was now standing before Padraig, nude except for the drop cloth that was suddenly tied about her shoulders, blotched brown and yellow with what might have been watercolor sunflowers, perfect in their irregularity, as no seamstress could envision. Her skin was taut and even, her knees slender and cocked, her feet and calves vein-less. She seemed to have regressed in age about thirty years. She had the soft, light-filled flesh of a twenty year-old.

Padraig, as he would take a moment to learn, was also a sight, having transmuted into a young Bulgarian gentleman, bristly, square, and of uneven muddy complexion. He had lost about twenty years, himself.

“Oh,” Padraig said. He knelt. “Cinderella—”

They were blessed. They were finally allowed the experience of being the same age. Because of their religious backgrounds, neither of which emphasized memorization or textual immersion, there were certain opportune verses that didn’t occur to Dyna or Padraig. Which couldn’t have mattered less.

He discussed the Monte Carlo with Brad. Brad was at one time addicted to Keno and—as he admitted with readiness, as to a physician—fellatio. And so Brad would sit in a dull, out-of-the-way sort of variety act lounge and get himself blind drunk while he spent the better part of his paycheck. And then he would go out in the county, he confessed—too quickly to be redirected—to dispense the remainder.

“Hmm,” Lucas said. “But you’ve moved beyond that.”

Brad sniffed. He rubbed his oily dress-shirt.

“Right,” Brad said. “But what I was gonna say about the Leather Room was it was like a kind of no man’s land inside the casino. I could never find a camera in there, I never saw a pit boss. It was like they’d built one extra room onto the Carlo on accident, and they didn’t have any other use for it so they just stored losers in there.”

“Is there a fire exit inide?”

“Yes. But I don’t see how you’re going to get past all the guards they have going. You can see them on television—”

“It’s okay, Brad. All I need is an entry point.”

Lucas was ready. He rechecked his loose-leaf. He fine-tuned his delivery, delivered soothing philosophical tones to his own reflection in the suite’s free-standing vanity mirror. He sang a song and stretched his face. Jacqueline laughed at him. He desired to know her. Physiology intervened. So they lazed in the suite. Lucas bought a pay-per-view documentary about the history of special operations: the Special Air Service, “Z” units, the Delta Force, and so on. They didn’t watch it. They talked. They listened to the baby.

Lucas donned un-dyed flax-fiber linen pants, a baby blue Polo of organic prewashed yarns. The Kung Fu path.

He lay beside his wife.

5.
The next morning Hitch and Rita MacAbee woke up in a recreational vehicle parked off the Scenic Drive in Red Rock Canyon where they had spent their honeymoon the day before. They’d hiked the Moenkopi Loop. It was long and leisurely and you got to see crossbeds loaded down with fossils. You got to see red cliffs. The information plaques that dotted the path explained and extolled the Triassic Period. You got to see sand and scrub. It was boring and undemanding and they loved it. They had sex.

They found a horse in the abandoned stables. She was fidgety and she tried to bite MacAbee when he approached her. But she let Rita hug her and she let Rita ride her and eventually she let Rita let Hitch MacAbee aboard. They made a short, inelegant loop around the visitors’ center. The horse was old. They let her go. It got dark and they built a fire. Hitch MacAbee burned a fingernail off. The fire was overborne with green leaves the lounge singer had gathered and whichever side of it they sat on, and however far they went, it poured steamy, white, green-smelling smoke on them. So Hitch doused it. It poured smoke and steam another half-hour. It enveloped the motorhome like fairy-laden bog mist. They had sex.

Now the morning sky blitzed bright blue over the sandstone escarpment before them, the sun above and behind it. MacAbee crawled out in the warm air, wandering to the edge of the gravel parking corral. He scratched and stretched and was half naked. He was happy. He was reading an informative plaque. It was entitled “Thrust Faults.” Rita appeared behind him, taking his hand.

“What does it say?”

Hitch pulled her to him.

“It says in a thrust fault the lower plate climbs on top of the upper layer.”

Both half-clad people stared up at the regular, flood-chafed surface up before them. Hitch pointed to the line where one layer mounted the other, in total contact like two hands pressed together.

“How long has it been here?” said Rita MacAbee.

MacAbee turned to her. Her bottom was wrapped loosely in an old bed sheet, faded orange flowers and faded green leaves and vines. He traced the straps of her pilly white cotton camisole—his favorite piece of clothing in the universe—slack over freckled shoulders.

“65 million years,” he said. “Thereabouts.”

They kissed, out in the arid open, not a tourist or a ranger within miles, no one. And they looked out again as the sun trumpeted free of the escarpment, out over the duny lifelessness, as upon the land of Nod: as with half a notion to populate it themselves.
Daniel Murrain woke up on the steps of the Queen of Mercy Parish. After their conference the night before, Fr. Burger had banished him from the building. He gave him a dark maroon cushion from a chapel prie-Dieu and a lady’s blue cloak that had hung in the expansive vestibule for half a century. Daniel had slept against a pillar. He felt bent when he woke, kinked about the area of his brainstem. He stood. He weaved for a moment in the light. He saw the passing face of the Circus Circus attendant in his mind, glowing like a Buddha—

He went to the huge doors and pounded, big booms as against an enormous chest.

“Burger!” he cried.

He boomed on the door. He banged a knuckle on the molding, and when Fr. Burger appeared, Daniel had turned around, bent over, as though conversing with a vermin.

“Fuck!” Daniel said.

“Daniel,” Fr. Burger hissed. “Please shut up.”

Daniel turned back to the door. Behind Fr. Burger he saw the church half-full of slumbering people, like scattered laundry bags, blankets in the aisles, bare feet over pews.

“There are people in there?”

Fr. Burger stepped outside and slid the door back shut.

“Daniel,” he said. “If you don’t be quieter I’m going to thrash you in a way you will remember for the rest of world history.”

Daniel was still nursing his injury, wincing.

“When did they come?”

“Through the night,” said Fr. Burger. “While you were sleeping.”

“Why do they get to sleep in there and I have to out here on the granite.”

“First of all I don’t like you,” said Fr. Burger. “Second of all you could have slept anywhere...”

Daniel blinked.

“Or do tell me, if you can, why you needed to sleep here. Why you came back to the church last night. Why you came to the church in the first place.”

Daniel took a breath.

“Whg—”

“You are here for precisely the reason all these people are.” Fr. Burger gestured stiffly behind him. “But coddling and reassurance is not what you need now or have ever needed.”

“What do I need?” he said.

“You need to be turned out on your ass, Daniel.” Fr. Burger cleared his throat, standing straighter. “You’re so much like myself fifty ridiculous years ago that I can hardly be around you anyway, so that’s fine.”

Daniel smiled.

“I’m gonna go fix the world a little bit,” Daniel said.

Fr. Burger nodded. “Fine,” he said. “God bless you.”

Daniel nodded.

Daniel bowed.

It was, Daniel confessed, adorable.

“Ma’am,” he said as Cindy passed.

Cindy stopped.

“Can I get a zombie, please.”

Cindy looked around. “Have you been playing?”

Daniel nodded. “I just put one dollar in this machine. I have more, but I’d rather give them to you.”

Cindy shook her head. She had orange hair, raspy looking skin.

“I’m not supposed to do that.”

Daniel nodded. He shifted.

“Why do demons bother running a casino, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Cindy said.

“Because you cannot be comfortable in that get up.”

Cindy looked down. “You don’t like it?”

“Oh my God,” Daniel said. “I love it. I’m just afraid it’s going to cripple you.”

Cindy nodded, her mail hood slinking.

“They wanted authentic.”

Daniel held out fifty dollars.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Bring me three zombies, and if they bother you you send them over to me.”

Cindy laughed. “You’re nutty,” she said, snatching the bill.

“They call it disorganized schizophrenia.”

Cindy mimed was walking away. Daniel took a deep breath. He waited. The gaming floor zoomed with mail-laden women, bunchy-suited demons, droves of pale, placid gamblers, blowing lifesavings before time ran out—their moves precise and repetitive as though compulsory. Cindy reappeared.

Daniel smiled. “Thanks.”

He removed a grape-colored cocktail and emptied it.

“Aghghgh,” he said as he breathed, coughing on 151. “Ow.”

He took another one.

Cindy hunched her tray-elbow against her side.

“What brings you to Vegas?” she said. “End of the World?”

“I’m—” Daniel spluttered. He took a breath. He grabbed the final cocktail. “I have people here.”

Cindy nodded. “Yeah. I was just gonna open my own little seamstress place, too, with my sister—”

Daniel sssssssssed out the burn.

“Well,” he huffed. “No time like the present.”

He made an involuntary sort of clucking sound. Cindy stared at him. He dropped another bill.

“Can I have three more of these—sweetie?”

“Yes,” said the huskier one, Greg.

Daniel swallowed. They were passing table games, his legs twisted between Greg’s bristly paws, his head twisted in the arms of Greg’s cohort. He found himself without a plan.

“Well...” Daniel said. “What do you think of it?”

“A bunch of Commie double-deals,” said Greg’s unidentified accomplice.

“That’s right,” Greg said.

“That’s right!” Daniel agreed, squeaking as Greg’s coworker repositioned him between his forearms and biceps. “Exactly my point.”

Both demons stopped, blinking. They stood before the Sportsbook, considering something. Daniel was lucky to have found two of the most philosophic demons in all the annals of abysmal time, high percentiles on the untestably low demonic intelligence rubric.

“What does that mean,” said Greg. “‘Exactly my point’?”

“Only that—” Daniel shoved scaly hide out of his mouth. “Only that this is the last time in all of eternity for you to do something without orders, without collective agreement—as yourselves.” Daniel coughed. ““We,” remember, is the one word that must never enter the human soul.”

The demons grunted quietly, thinking.

“You know,” Daniel said. “Human or any other of...God’s children’s souls.”

“Hmm,” said Greg.

His friend grunted, unanimous. “Huh.”

“So,” Daniel was saying, “I don’t want to complicate a crucial moment of apocalypsis for you two, but if you could just take me—” Daniel squirmed, choking. He pointed to the fire exit/area of refuge beside a nickel-slot pavilion. “Over there, then I’ll get out of your hair. I can recommend some books if you like.”

“Yes,” said Greg.

“You will have to—” said Greg’s companion, stolid.

And in a moment they dumped Daniel on his skull on the burnished cement and the base of the stairs. Sound bounced around them, breathy.

Meanwhile in the Leather Room a Liberace sat tuning up as Jim Johns the Antichrist was looking over his own notes for the evening. His first “fireside chat” was a couple hours away, an informal pep talk he intended to give nightly until the End. Tonight was called: “Death as No Big Thing.” Crisp white dinner linens lay on the Antichrist’s large table. There was an open journal on the table and beside it a heavy Swiss fountain pen Jacqueline bought him, and beside that a tall red and blue Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Twelve boxy, suit-wearing demons were sentried around.

At this time the Antichrist’s theologian Keighlis approached from the further noise and grim frenzy of the casino. Jim Johns looked up from the page as he arrived.

“You can have the resurrection, my darlings,” Liberace was saying behind Keighlis. “Or you can have...Liberace.”

“Keighlis,” said the Antichrist. “Where have you been all day?”

“Praying,” Keighlis said. “Something I’ve been toying with lately.”

Keighlis was pale and clammy, Jim noticed, as though slightly melted.

“Praying to whom?”

Keighlis smiled. “It’s a fair question.”

“Well, Mozel tof,” said the Antichrist, smiling. “Your wife and kid coming out?”

Keighlis smile was perverse. Depravity seethed from the mint-green eyes, the small light pink mouth, as Keighlis slid from his jacket pocket a small white laminated card. Laid out in lean Carolingian calligraphy was the Vade Retro Satana. Keighlis barely looked to it. His eyes smoldered green-blue. The demons were oblivious.

“May the Holy Cross be my light,” he began quietly, hardly audible over the jangles of the impersonator far behind him. “Let not the dragon lead me—”

The Antichrist got a minor twinge in his neck. As he rubbed it he noticed his goons making similar motions. His hand tingled.

“Step back Satan,” the short, fiercely red-headed theologian raged quietly. “Never tempt me with vain things.

Jim’s head whipped back and he struggled to stand, though his back seemed to have been riveted to the chair, excruciatingly tight. A couple of the thugs screamed, fearful and falsetto. They banged the table awkwardly.

“What you offer me is evil—”shouted Keighlis, heaving with emotional exhaustion, a gross weight of corruption rushing away in every direction like a landslide.

He breathed.

“Drink the virus yourself.”

The roaring left Keighlis ears. The weight on his lungs, the closing hands around his face and neck lifted away. Each member of the table before him was paralyzed in a frozen moment of terror, arms raised as though to a blow, rictus, the awful smell of their open mouths hanging rife.

Jim Johns began to wet the floor as in a florid seizure-dream he watched his fiancé Nadyenka Czillicz rising out of a mist. Her mouth moved, but as the spell wracked him all Jim heard were the wraithy canyons of the afterlife: howling and slavering for his homecoming. The dream-Nadyenka leaned close—

“Bye,” she said.

Keighlis took a full deep breath. Something he hadn’t been able to do in a day and a half. Like a garbageman, he had forgotten what he smelled, what he had seen. Now everything roared back in the clarity of his mind and once, with emotion, and he sneezed.

“Absit Omen,” said Keighlis, rubbing his nose. “All best.”

He dropped a large fiberglass canister on to the table where it bounced the water glasses that stood upturned upon folded napkins. He turned and walked to the door, and when he opened it, two unbeings were on the alley floor, motionless, as though in one frozen convulsion—their spines welded to the pavement. And he went from the room, slow, light on him, as though he were going to heaven.

Back in the Leather Room the Man of Sin was pulling free of his chair all at once. His body felt shellacked. He held his chest, trying to catch his breath. He heard the scourges and racketeers around him gasping and moaning. On stage at this time Liberace, who was obscured behind the baby grand’s propped lid, began a very upbeat “El Cumbachero.”

The Antichrist saw his journal splayed on the floor. He saw half the title, big in black marker.

—NO BIG THING.

The Antichrist viewed the bomb on the table. He watched it fold open. He went to speak and flames filled up his mouth.

Lucas removed his notes. He saw:

“What is it?” Jacqueline said.

Lucas coughed. His mouth felt odd, his tongue numb; his spit tasted cheddary. He coughed again.

“Nulepsin D,” he said.

Jacqueline thought.

“What’s that?”

“It’s an antipsychotic prescription I’ve been taking for two years.”

Jacqueline nodded. “What’s it doing to you?”

“I haven’t taken it in four days,” he said. “But old metabolites hang around in creases in the brain. Sometimes high stress washes them out.”

Jacqueline thought again.

“You’re not psychotic, Lucas.”

This made Lucas smile so big he almost started crying. He stood up straighter. He was still trembling.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Are you going to fight in this condition?”

Lucas limp-wince-hopped into motion toward the mouth of the alley.

“Do you think I can do it?” he said.

Jacqueline followed—

“Honestly?”

When the alley came into view a short man with a red beard was exiting one of the gray-painted doors along the wall. As he continued away it slowly shut itself, pulled by a pneumonic arm, and clicked in place, just long enough to be blown off its hinges with a roar and tumble through the alley, followed by a projectile college dictionary, lit-up like a comet.

Jacqueline and Lucas d’Estime ducked. Keighlis Libellus approached slowly and passed them, staid, without comment. When Keighlis came to the Boulevard he looked one way and then the other, before setting off toward the Tradewinds timeshare facility, a few miles off the Strip. By the time he arrived, it wouldn’t be there, sadly. And neither would his wife and child. And neither would he.

Two demons lay welded on the concrete, thrashing before Lucas and Jacqueline. Half their skin was gone.

The Leather Room smoked and stunk. Jacqueline and Lucas surveyed it. Up onstage the piano was obliterated, tiny ivory panels strewn about like dropped teeth; Liberace was a scorched bone monument on the floor, sticky with charred protein. Where the Antichrist and his employees had sat there was no carpet, no paint, an inverted crater in the ceiling. The explosion had blown itself out, the fire was gone, but every organic surface smoked, every polymer boiled. Lucas was looking at an enormous chandelier before the stage that had been blown free of the ceiling. Its brass melted into the matted carpet, its lead crystal flutes coruscated blue and yellow in new, infernoed shapes—

“Who’s that?” said Jacqueline.

Lucas turned. He looked where she pointed.

What it was was a nattily accoutered young gentleman of about twenty-five who had just kicked open the half-fused men’s room door. He was olive, of South American features, wearing a stunning black three-button suit and swaggering with an orange cocktail in his right hand, what looked like a boxcar or a sidecar, cherry and pink umbrella emphasized. The clean interior of the bathroom beat out white fluorescents behind him.

He stood before the carnage. Then, as his eyes came to rest upon Lucas, he boggled anew.

“No,” he said, “way.”

Lucas smiled. “Cerberus—”

Cerberus approached. “How did I know I’d see you here? What did you...” He pointed with his cocktail hand. “Did you do that?”

Lucas didn’t look at the scene. “No,” he said.

At this time, distantly the sound of shofar blasts could be heard through the open side door. The Poly-Espousal Endgame Militia had entered the Strip.

“So who is Cerberus?” Lucas said.

Cerberus smiled. Undoing four buttons he revealed a wound resmbling a blue-purple moon-crater from the shot Lucas had given him, sixteen inches wide, maybe a handspan deep.

He looked up. “Who the fuck is Lucas d’Estime?”

Lucas laughed.

The shofars sounded again, closer now.

“A light in an empty place,” Cerberus said. “That’s exactly what you are.”

Lucas demurred.

“Please,” he said

They shook, and Cerberus lunged out the door.

“He’s a good guy,” Jacqueline was saying behind Lucas as he stood thinking.

“Yes he is.”

Taking his wife around the waist then, gently, he followed his protégée.
--missing stuff—
Lucas took the stage. In his final attempt to restore calm, his final act as psychological healer, he was going to improvise his own fireside chat. He went to the PA boards at the side of the stage and cranked the volume, a hiss cutting the air.

“Okay,” he shouted. “If I could just get this out.” Here he held aloft Jim John’s Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, black with char and caramelized demon tissue. Lucas cleared his throat: “Does anyone know what this is—?”

Before the crowd could even register the question several black ceremonial ram’s horns had peeked up within the crowd and again began to blow, sounding the alarm—as the Poly-Espousal Militia Seal put it—“in God’s Holy Mountain.” Pethuel Melchizedek rose above the crowd on the shoulders of a large militiaman named Harold. Pethuel was beet-red; his scalp glowed through his blond hair. He screamed with a shredded sound.

“Wake!” he said. “Wake you drunkards and WEEP!”

The shofars descended once more, Pethuel was descending—“WAKE!”—and the Militia, horrid with automatic and semi-automatic weapons, began laying waste to the crowd.

“Oh, for Godssake—” said Jesus Christ, who was presently standing beside Lucas onstage.

As the Militia’s guns heated up, the jury-rigged rounds began shredding in the barrels, in many cases causing the following report to destroy the weapon. Several Poly-Espousal Militia members threw their guns away, stunned to silence as they gazed upon maimed digits. When Pethuel Melchizedek’s weapon failed he dropped it, and with shredded gloves drew his side arms. He continued firing for a just moments before being shot dead by Officer Derek Perico, who stood among the Abnormal Vigilance personnel who’d begun firing from the other side of the crowd—their SECRET AGENT status blown wide before heaven like bugles as with miserable confidence they dropped zealots.

A shofar blew next to Derek’s ear. He looked around to find no agent nearby. He whirled, blind, and caught Jiff Parker’s pen knife in his ear. The noise of absolute panic rose over the gunfire. It got louder and did not die down. Anyone who wished to stop and think rather than scream found themselves unable. The noise rose. It grew a backmasking quality, roaring, roaring, up and up and up as in the Valley of Decision.

You heard Hell.

Nadyenka felt herself shaking on the cooler-than-room-temperature 550-count surface of her down comforter. She gripped herself and was terrified and ran from the room, trembling and stumbling as though battling from a heart attack. She had to get downstairs. She felt the remaining planks of space time crowding and collapsing her, pulling her down like some universal sinker, like a black dwarf star. And when Nadyenka entered the hallway, Daniel Murrain was coming toward her.

She froze. But Daniel smiled and instantly was clotheslined prostrate by a hulking gentleman named Fitz Waldo Daniel had not noticed exiting the suite’s other front door. Nadyenka screamed a little.

“Nadge,” Daniel splurted. He coughed. “Please.”

Fitz looked to Nadyenka. She made no move of clemency, and so Fitz knee-dropped Daniel’s testicles.

“Whaaaaaaaa...” cried Daniel, rolling over on his face, wailing into the carpet.

Fitz looked to Nadyenka again, tugging his lapels. She motioned him back.

“Whhaaaa-ha-ha...” Daniel bawled, choking. “Why?”

Nadyenka was above him now. She pulled him back over with a heel, and their eyes met. Dan smiled in perverse agony. “Why?” he rasped.

Nadyenka shook her head. “That’s a stupid question.”

Daniel stared at her a moment before acceding to the comment, his head lolling back against the carpet in affirmation. And Nadyenka went to step past.

Daniel strained back up again. The pain and emotion of the knee-drop broke him in a sweat.

“I need you, Nadyenka.” Dan was tearful, the words rote. “I always did.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Nadyenka shook her head. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think you did.”

“No.”

The sad girl smiled a little, weary.

“It’s a good question.”

Gently Nadyenka kicked him over again, to put him face down. She stepped by.

“Nadge.” Dan’s voice was weak, kicked-in sounding.

Nadyenka got all the way to the elevator before she stopped. She didn’t turn around.

“What?”

The gilt jaws of the elevator hung open behind her, waiting. Fitz held them.

Nadyenka shook her head, turning. Fitz Waldo selected ground floor and took his place beside her.

“I’d hate to say I envy you,” she said, the old girlish malice in the voice for one second, just as the doors slid over her like eyelids—

Dan laughed, wincing, keeping one hand to his genitals for a moment, doing nothing. Then, when he felt he had the necessary breath, he began fishing with the other hand for the cell phone in his left front pocket. He dialed, breathing hard. He heard the faint blips of tower switches—digital phone calls in extraordinarily high volume at that moment—and when the rings came they were distorted, consonant and whispery.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” Daniel said.

He heard Nisha sigh. “What?”

“What’s going on?”

“The world is ending,” she said.

“I heard.”

“I just wanted to say it was all my fault, and you were right. I got kicked in the balls and that just all came to me.”

Nisha was quiet for a moment.

“Well,” she said. “I don’t think it was all your fault.”

“Well,” Dan said. “But you’re only fault was of associating with me. That’s a common mistake.”

“I don’t consider it a mistake, Daniel.”

“What a mistake?”

“Any of it.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You mean because of your determinist culture, though.” Dan shifted carefully on the hall floor wincing. “Karma, dharma. Everything happens for a specific reason and so on. You’re talking about fate.”

Dan frowned. He experimented with removing the comforting pressure from his genitals and felt compelled immediately to put it back.

“I do know the world’s not going to be here in a minute,” Nisha said. “And I know that losing everything means something. That makes me think I’m glad I lived.”

Daniel laughed, sudden as a cough, and with that unguarded movement tears began to fall, it hurt, some the result of genital distress.

“That’s really, good, actually,” he spluttered. “Maybe you’ll make it to Christian Heaven after all.”

“We’ll see,” she said, a smile suddenly in her tone.

Daniel was still laughing.

“Hey, Nisha,” he said finally. “You know what?”

“What.”

“I should have made you a wife.”

“Is, uh...” Daniel said. His voice failed. “Um...”

“She’s right here, Daniel.”

“Thank you, Nisha.”

“You’re welcome—” she said, the last words of Nisha Sankara in the remainder of the universe for Daniel Murrain.

There was silence before Daniel heard the sound of the phone shifting hands—as cascades of flame played down over Daniel’s spirit, starbursts and incredible bangs letting off in his chest. His face streamed. He glittered. He took put his feline/silver dollar and looked at it. He answered like a sigh...

“Durga.”

Jesus stood before them a few minutes, smiling as upon distant remembrances. He was toothy and blond. And for a few minutes no one said anything. Then in the air Jesus drew a large rectangle that Nadyenka and everyone else assumed to be metaphorical until they looked a second time to find an actual door stood open in the space indicated. In the air above it a sign hung. It said: “PIT.” It was not a moment before crowd members were lining up single-file before the stage to enter the impossible gateway, while others set about with whatever was available trying to remove their right hands and right feet and several others mustering the resolve necessary to gouge out their right eyes.

“Teacher,” a low man in the front of crowd was saying. The guns had gone silent; for the moment everyone was looking, and everyone was listening.

“Is this the Return?”

The seven Abnormal Vigilance agents who remained and the four Poly-Espousal Militiamen who remained stood slack-jawed. It would have been impossible to say which group was more surprised.

“Well,” Jesus said, thinking about it. “It’s a return, isn’t it.”

The crowd looked at itself, wondering.

“Teacher,” someone called. “Why is the world ending?”

Jesus sighed.

“You don’t explain a parable,” he said. “Like a joke or a koan: you just don’t.”

Lucas laughed, doubling over with sheer, excruciating weight of joy.

At this time a few feet behind the unlimitable, inconceivable one who is better than any, Jacqueline d’Estime slipped on some fluid and bumped down on the stage before Lucas could catch her. But when He lifted her back up there was a baby in her hands, screaming. Lucas immediately began weeping like a child. He roared. Jacqueline brandished the infant weakly.

Jesus smiled, shaking his head.

“So—Teacher.”

Jesus turned back to the crowd. “Yes.”

“Is righteousness a technicality?”

“Well....” Jesus said. He thought about it.. “It has technical aspects.”

Jesus looked around him. He noticed that a linen draped figure called Artie Gunn was kneeling before him now, turban set aside, face pressed to the asphalt. Presently he sat up, a piece of black gravel stuck to his forehead. Jesus smiled, brushing it away. Artie was holding forth a quantity of myrrh, difficult to find raw, once used to mask the smoke of burning corpses. Calvert stood a few feet behind, waiting.

Jesus smiled.

“Now,” Artie said, standing. “If I could just say a few words about World Religion.”

“Please,” Jesus said.

Nadyenka leapt out of line. She touched him.

Only seconds remained.