Kingdom come

The point is it’s difficult to make sense of things, prohibitively difficult, as they say, and it is best to make peace with the fact. Lunatics, in particular, do not.

Take pop stars.

Take your Biology department—

“Did you want to sit in the front, sweetie?” Nadyenka said, “or have more room?”

Jacqueline looked up. In the colorless half-light her skin looked gray; her henna-rouge coiffure, pillow-flat, hung above her face like a tattered ensign.

“Room,” she coughed.

So Nadyenka got in front, and Lucas ran talk radio at high volume for the first leg of their journey to obviate chatter. In the backseat of the giant SUV, Jacqueline assembled a fainting couch of organic linens. MacAbee sat against the door opposite, where Jacqueline heeled him in the ribs repeatedly.

Jacqueline had crafted her response to Jean-Baptiste with sadist precision the night before.

Jac
Jacqueline took the implicit remonstrance to the post office at about eleven p.m. She squealed in spite of herself as she dropped it in, and drove home full of her new adventure, with a rush of optimism she never thought to desire.

From his suite twenty stories above, MacAbee’s manager Tot Maddock looked on. The image frightened him, caused a low-grade nausea that would stick to him all day. It was getting harder not to think about things.

Tot Maddock’s full-name was Tot Tot Maddock. He’d been an A-list adult film star in the golden age of that form. Then Tot was pressed into service as muscle, when organized crime executives were converting Las Vegas from frontier pleasuredome into variegated theme park. Later, Tot dabbled in producing. He dabbled in club-life. He re-dabbled in hired goonery when necessary. He started representing lounge trash. Tot had been working on a science fiction opera for years. It was tome-ish at this stage. It would never be finished.

“Hi,” said the President, calling out as he disappeared under the awning of the Four Seasons. “Hey...”

About the middle of the action, for instance, two republican freedom-fighters of the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte Galaxy end up hiding out in our solar system. And this affords them the opportunity of watching from the Earth’s moon as every last prediction in the Book of Revelation is made true. The WLMs have the following exchange as they observe all honest men on Earth being imprisoned.

Riggle: Yes.

Fenk: How depressing.

Riggle: Well.

Fenk: I mean, what is the point of the little blue place?

Riggle: Well...barbeque.

Fenk: Yes, barbeque.

Riggle: That at least.

There is no way to remain profitable if the world ends. Deduce from this maxim. Induce from the recurrence and concurrence of existential strangenesses in modern life. Tot did not know who populated the other side of the bargaining table—the side that wished to end it all, presumably with whom the President had been brought in to deal.

It could have been aliens. That was probably the most scientific conclusion.

And it could be the Hellion.

“That’s a very,” Pavle was saying, “just a remarkable situation.”

“Yes,” said Jacqueline. “I’m not sure I haven’t gone mad.”

“Normally this is difficult to ascertain.”

Pavle’s accent, as Jacqueline described it, was as though Mussolini had swallowed a Frenchman. Like the Pope through a mouthful of gruyere.

“But when I told him I was coming along,” said Jacqueline, “I was holding up a picture of his mother.”

“Aaaah...”

“He saw the implication.”

“Putting down the duck,” said Pavle.

“Whatever.”

“If he does not let you go along on his journey, you will enlist the aid of his mother, the fundamentalist.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m thinking this will be a kind of vision-quest for you,” Pavle said.

“Exactly my feeling,” said Jacqueline.

“Be well,” Pavle said.

“You also,” said Jacqueline.

“While on your journey,” Pavle said, “consider the goddess Callidwen.”

“Ah,” she said. “Will do.”

“How is your back?” Pavle said.

“Terrible,” said Jacqueline.

“It is wonderful to be needed.”

“Thank you, Pavle,” said Jacqueline.

“Thank you, Jacqueline,” said Pavle.
Fort Worth is awash in goat’s blood, said the local news, which they caught on the truck stop restaurant television, as its diners grunted and sighed around them—huge men bellowing nicotine, a man with a cigarette put out in his pancakes, a man with a cigarette put out in his eggs. Mephitis.

On a TV above the service window behind which a line-cook smoked draped in the viscid emissions of the grill whose teeth when he smiled featured windows as onto a lightless hell the scene played: Satanists—computer techs, overnight security guards, natural-food store managers, unsuccessful folk acts, and so on—were out on the streets in full regalia, waving their baskets and burning their brooms, keening and ululating to their dread master, the Angel of Light, the lounge musician of the afterlife, that great horned Yorick—as they said, “Lord Satan.”

Jacqueline exploded the sunny side of her eggs, let them ooze down to fill up her plate and then never touched them again. Nadyenka had three glasses of orange juice, smiling at Lucas like a worshipped older brother throughout. MacAbee ate happily, conversing on various topics which no one heard. They’d made it as far as Oklahoma City. By this time Jacqueline’s complaint of back problems and existential discomfit, along with Nadyenka’s repeated complaint of hunger and thirst and a “backed up” feeling she could not f­ully describe, punctuated by MacAbee’s second encore of “Willow Weep for Me,” had finally convinced Lucas to pull over.

“Our home—” Lucas said.

For on the screen stood the community of Rancho Ranchero, and the d’Estime household, among several others on the block, was engulfed in flame. A girl in a brown translucent dress danced before the infernos with a tambourine. Others burned their baskets. Others burned dolls of the President. Someone sold bottles of water. After a moment, something occurred to Lucas just as it was taking form on screen.

“Oh God,” he said, and right then the upper story of their house began to chatter with gunfire.

By this point the blaze had reached and properly heated Lucas’ cache of weaponry in the attic. In a moment, cases that contained hundreds of rounds would be raining over the heads of onlookers. Unwitting, the news camera settled on the d’Estime home as the source of the noise, searching among the flames for an explanation. Lucas was wondering if his surface-to-air missile battery had been reached, and just then it was. With a boom that rattled both audio and video, the top story of the house became invisible in white heat, and a moment later showered the yard with hell, pouring itself out in annihilation—glass and siding fibers raining into the street.

With shrieks the onlookers fled, but the cameraman seemed to have taken a hit or swooned, for the camera swung down onto the pavement, coming to rest on its side—still transmitting. The diner was emptying around the wayfarers now, and just before the cook reached up and snapped off the image, what was obviously a weather chopper came crashing into the foreground and exploded on the d’Estime’s driveway.

“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said.

The whole table turned to look at him at once. And he regretted ever borrowing that surface-to-air device.
Lucas d’Estime was born on a cool afternoon in the leafy Cuchumatanes mountains of eastern Guatemala. At the time his mother Noelle was taking part in a missionary excursion organized by her church—Three Persons Apostolic. All day they’d been raising simple shelters of eight-by-twelve beams, tin roofs, and sturdy plywood windbreaks. Something like low tech bus-stop shelters, these light structures were premium housing here, somewhere to get out of the rain, somewhere clean and comparatively cool for the elderly and sick. All morning Noelle d’Estime had been sinking post-holes with a rusty clam shovel when the exertion induced her to begin labor. Shortly thereafter she delivered Lucas, six weeks ahead of schedule.

Later, while Lucas and his mother slept in the damp cool of the evening, the Ixil village in which they had been toiling was raided. Thin, ill-looking Hondurans in baggy green uniforms barged through the quiet, sequestered habitation, shouting and firing-off rusty Kalashnikovs. The townspeople dispersed, Noelle’s midwife Ximala leading mother and baby down a soft path into the jungle. The remaining missionaries were berated and threatened in Maya-Spanish for several minutes. There was a tenuous moment in which Zatz, the gang’s clammy ringleader, seemed to be considering conversion to Apostolic Christianity, this by way of the tonelessly expert Spanish of assistant pastor Jefferson Chambers. But shortly it became apparent that Jefferson was merely being stalled, as the remaining hostages had their pockets turned-out, their jewelry collected, and their credit card information recorded. Zatz’s men herded the Americans into the dirt-floor meeting hall and barred the doorway with a hulking lumber cart, then fed themselves at the common wood oven and moved on.

Noelle had cut down, and later preserved in paraffin, the single bone-white Nun’s Cap orchid that hung above her and her son as they huddled in the dusk-green jungle, listening to the low, earnest prayers of the Ixil. She called it: El Salvador.

Noelle d’Estime had been described as “impeccably religious.” She actively promoted the appellation. From a young age, Lucas was babysat by a Chinese refugee and Apostolic convert named Li Duk, and despite repeated caveats, Lucas developed an expansive interest in Eastern thinking. Noelle pushed Lucas toward the priesthood, though he had openly renounced his belief in any specific deity at the age of twelve, repeating the claim every year at Christmas, and on his birthday, and in other extemporaneous moments as loudly and to as many relatives as possible. Which protestations Noelle d’Estime ignored so utterly and implacably it made you doubt you’d ever spoken.

On Lucas’ eighteenth birthday, then, when the substantial trust fund his father had left deployed, Noelle took Lucas to her bank. They created a checking account in Lucas’ name and made arrangements for the substantial transfer. That evening Lucas and his mother were standing in the large kitchen of their home in Palestine, Texas, as Noelle discussed the mission she expected her son to found with this new windfall: possible locations, ministerial emphases, and so on—

“Mother.” Lucas interrupted her.

Noelle d’Estime halted She looked over calmly to where Lucas stood akimbo in the doorway that led out to the living room as though just noticing his presnce.

“Lucas,” she said.

Noelle was nearly fifty at this time, hair an immaculate and complex and carefully managed chestnut. She leaned on the marble counter.

“I have a letter from school,” Lucas said.

Noelle nodded. “Wonderful.”

“They’ve...” Lucas said. “They accepted me.”

He was holding out the letter now, as though for proof.

“Who?”

Noelle sighed, folding her arms. “Accepted you for what purpose?”

“For...For school.”

“College.”

“Yes. For that.”

Noelle nodded. “I thought we discussed college. Perhaps I’m mistaken.”

“No,” Lucas said. “We discussed it. Hundreds of times.”

He coughed.

“And what did we establish?” said Noelle.

“You said I shouldn’t go to college unless I wanted to be a doctor or a teacher.”

“Or?”

“Or a lawyer.”

“...Or a minister.” Lucas coughed again.

“Yes,” said Noelle d’Estime. “And which have you decided to become?”

A quake traversed Lucas lower abdomen as he fumbled out the answer.

“Doctor,” he said.

“Doctor of what?”

“Psychology,” Lucas said and, still feeling he needed corroboration: “I want to help people.”

Noelle nodded, tapping her lips in thought. This generally meant she didn’t believe him and was allowing him to stew in futile deceit.

“School,” she said finally, “is not a therapeutic exercise.”

Lucas saw the whole spectacle of young adult freedom flashing up before him like the promotional film of some unreachable amusement park.

Noelle was calculating, still tapping with the delicate forefinger. Finally she stopped.

“No,” she said. “I have never felt that Psychology was really a science.”

“Not a science...” Lucas said. There was no breath in the words. He knew the speech.

“No,” answered Noelle d’Estime. “Not in the way neurology is, for instance.”

She cleared her throat, as she pushed off the counter and stood straight, her contemplative posture giving way to the totalitarian: geometrically precise in bearing.

“Eventually you will be a man of God,” she said. “Of that I have no worries. Then you can “help” anyone you wish. Until then you will not waste yourself in nihilistic pursuits like your father. Your death will not be a paean to nothingness.”

Lucas stared at his mother, the vision of his young adulthood blazing behind her like an unexplored planet.

Lucas sighed. He had no air. His gut hurt.

“Ok.”

That night he left home. From Houston he bussed to San Francisco. Within a week his father’s monies were at his disposal, and from San Francisco he pointed toward the orient: aboard a rusty green ocean liner called the “Lotus Ancestor.”

In a sunken marble room, Duangjai found a man of about twenty in the garb of a novice seated cross-legged on the floor. Before him, enthroned among countless urns and statuettes, sat the Abbot, a silver-mustachioed gentleman in the white and red and gold robes of an elder. The Abbot was scratching his head, wincing slightly as he began to answer.

“Fine,” the old man said. “That’s fine, Lucas. You still haven’t told me what you want to be when you grow up.”

Lucas d’Estime cocked his head slightly, blinking at high speed as he thought.

“Religious figure,” he said.

This caused the monk to scratch his head again, exhausted, the old wrists thin as rulers, skin fragile as gold-leaf. He shook his head.

“That’s fine, Lucas,” he said. “You do that—”

Duangjai took Lucas to Bangkok, where Lucas trained in Double Aspect Theory and Muay Thai—the Martial Art from which kickboxing is derived. Lucas thrived. He became strong; his frame widened and thickened. He accrued enlightenment paths. After four months, he and Duangjai returned to the Nain monastery for the disposal of a young Jakartan drug-runner and pimp. Besides promoting peace and Buddha-nature, Duangjai explained, the Nain monastery had been processing and exporting opium loaves to the lower Orient for 1700 years.

When Lucas and Duangjai arrived, Lucas’ mother, Noelle d’Estime, was just exiting the white building, descending from its long stoa.

A horrifying smile unfurled upon the ageless face.

“Lucas!” she called.

Lucas froze so violently he began falling over. Duangjai steadied him up. Lucas coughed out an incomplete word-sound as his mother stopped before them. He spat. He said nothing.

“Your mother,” Duagjai explained in his perfect weatherman’s English, “is very...”

Duangjai stopped, as though he did not know the right word for the emotion to be represented.

“Convincing?” Noelle suggested.

“Yes,” said Duangjai. “This is exactly what she is.”

Resting Lucas on a squat pilaster, Duangjai bowed to each of them, and left, re-bowing to Noelle d’Estime and receiving a quick double cheek-kiss—la bise, one of the few vestiges of Noelle’s continentalist upbringing—before he disappeared inside.

Noelle laughed. “So glad you could make it, dear one,” she said. “I don’t know where you get your love of drama.”

“How...?” Lucas wheezed, gripping the stone thing that held him up.

Noelle smiled, with a faraway-ness in her eyes, of rage and fatigue and relief—

“Everything’s a process, my love. It took me a year to figure out where you’d gone, another six months to get here, and since then it’s been the tedious job of making contacts, trying to track you down.” She indicated the sanctuary behind her. “They’re very sweet here, though. They love to argue religion. I don’t know if I could have done it without them.”

Lucas coughed. “Duangjai...”

“Yes,” Noelle said. “Duangjai and myself started having regular phone conversations a few weeks ago. He’s recommitted his life to Christ now, isn’t that wonderful.”

At this point Lucas decided to vomit. Noelle stood over him where he now lay on the leaves, the toes of her attractive Fendi hiking boots nearly touching his lips.

“Mpoka.” Noelle employed her child’s nickname from a baby. “Are we ready?”

Lucas spat. He cried.

Noelle d’Estime was heiress to a small fortune amassed by a childless uncle of hers named Claude—a copper miner in the former Rhodesia. By the time Noelle received this money, she was deeply involved in the Apostolic Community of her native Ft. Worth—an anathema to the nihilist wealth of her family and their set. She took her inherited sum to Zambia, along with a few Three Persons Apostolic volunteers, to the very decimated communities that encamped her uncle’s former property, where the average annual income dipped well below 200 dollars. Noelle, a terse and redoubtable young brunette, raised a crew to build and outfit five churches. She paid the locals $10 a day, a salary she thought expressive of their value and her gratitude, but not so large as to denote pity, which she considered craven. When the churches were built she installed a cache of grain in each, along with a trusted volunteer pastor, and a large machine gun.

In the next eight years, as Noelle earned a Biology degree at the University of Texas, and thereafter an M.D. at Boston College, Noelle made regular trips—every school break and later with whatever vacation time she possessed—back to Zambia, ferrying in new missionaries, meeting with church leaders, tribal leaders, and tending the various civilian institutions that had sprung up around each new Protestant facility: booster clubs, glee clubs, home groups, couples counseling, and similar. Over time five churches became seven, and then six by merger. Noelle, of clinically adroit pronunciation by breeding, developed an effortless Zambian pigeon-English when she was in country. Of this her lovename for Lucas, the hard-headed offspring: “mpoka—sincerity.”

All this was ages ago, of course. But it was not until Lucas’ twenty-first birthday, which coincided with the abdication of constitutional government in Zambia, and a mass extinction of the northern province, that Noelle seemed lose all the tenderness she ever possessed.

**
Lucas’ father, Harcourt d’Estime, was a soldier of fortune. Noelle d’Estime, for the first eight years that she knew him, thought Harcourt was a traveling illustrated Bible salesman, which, nominally, he was. Harcourt died in a mine shaft in South Africa—the result of internecine strife between Oppenheimer brothers. Harcourt was putting in place demolition explosives, suspended on a long rappel, when the gentleman he was working for decided to release several acres of VX upon the farms of his sibling. This included the mine that contained Harcourt d’Estime. Harcourt recognized the smell immediately. He felt the contraction in his chest and neck. He felt the invader molecules obstructing nervous pathways within his brain, as with shaking movements he drew out his Marine-grade Bowie knife and slit himself free—speeding three quarters of a mile down into the darkness like a spirit—his body folding into a waiting forty-gallon drum where he landed.

Lucas was two at the time. Noelle relied on the church. After his abdication of the Christian religion, Lucas took up karate and turgid unremarkable nature poetry, which exercised the by-products of his overactive mind: destruction-lust and unbearable conscience. By the time he was thirty Lucas was established as a quasi-religious figure. His initial marriage to Jacqueline was not loveless, but neither was he engaged in any given act completely, for his actions had started pulling free of his emotions somehow, and perhaps it had started long ago, as though on a long, existential zipper.

In back, Jacqueline was intermittently attempting to rest beneath her lilac-scented eye pillow. She had grown a novel shade of pale with angst and agitation. MacAbee noodled with an LCD bass-fishing game he’d purchased at the truck stop.

“Is there really an independent film festival where we’re going?” Nadyenka was saying.

“I believe so,” said Lucas.

“And there’s also mercenary work?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t—” Lucas said.

“Notice the biome,” said Jacqueline to MacAbee in back.

MacAbee looked out and noticed it, his expression unchanged, for they had crossed into southeastern Kansas. And southeastern Kansas looked a lot like northeastern Oklahoma.

“What beta-diversity,” said Jacqueline, letting a gradual sigh of ennui.

MacAbee set his fishing game aside, removed the eye pillow from Jacqueline’s lap, and placed it over his own eyes—

“Who’s your employer?” Nadyenka said.

“No idea,” Lucas said. “I’m always at two removes from the money.”

“Does that make you feel better about it morally?”

“About what?”

“About being murder-for-hire.”

Lucas shrugged, eyes front.

“Feh,” he said.

“Feh?”

Nadyenka’s loins—she wanted to bite into his face.

As the Kansas earth passed away beneath them in its astonishing regularity.
By the time the coterie stopped again, Jacqueline’s advances had become intermittent. Periods of cataclysmic chafing were separated by depressive lulls. Jacqueline had pretended for several moments to be digging for something in a console compartment in the front seat. She craned across Lucas with undue awkwardness, twisting as though she didn’t know how to situate herself quite—this by way of brushing the side of Lucas’ mouth with her nipples, large and feather-soft in her pima cotton blouse. When she returned to the back seat, it could not be determined what she had acquired from the compartment, if anything.

Now she was musing on Inquisitional torture methods.

“The Vaginal Pear,” she said. “That’s a good one. And how about the Heretic’s Fork.”

“How about the Judas Cradle?” Nadyenka said cheerily.

Lucas resisted the urge to scold Nadyenka for participating.

“Those priests must have been so fucking depressed,” Jacqueline said. “To stand completely in the unobservable place. Of pure unhuman blackness. It’s a case study, for Chrissake...”

At first Jacqueline had seemed unwilling to accept the realness of all her possessions’ immolation, speaking airily of the homeowner’s insurance that would restore her meditation shrine and small home gym. Just when she was entering the bargaining component of her Catastrophic process, the emergent fact of her husband’s alternate career head distracted her—she remember the total indifference of their estrangement—and Jacqueline had moved right on into apocalyptic resignation. Lucas began to suspect the End of the World was related.

In St. Sabine, Kansas, they stopped at a gas station. Jacqueline went inside. Lucas hopped out and began to fill. MacAbee and Nadyenka waited upon him, like pupils, perched against the front bumper.

“There’s a Microtel three miles from here,” Lucas said. He indicated a general direction. “I’ll go on to Stull tomorrow morning, then the next day I’ll come back and we can all go to the film festival together.”

MacAbee and Nadyenka nodded, obeisant. Jacqueline was still in the gas station, browsing the inferior fruit juice selection, and then the roll-up horoscopes. Before she could return, Lucas snuck into the men’s room with his fatigues and body armor and weapons case, the Kung Fu path requiring that he sleep in his armor the night before its use.

Nadyenka entered the men’s room a moment later. It was a small room with a urinal and two stalls, the kind that deadbolts from the inside. Nadyenka turned the lock behind her in silence. The faucet was running. And Lucas was taking a pill.

Nadyenka had never seen Lucas in battle gear. The long black gun case was open in front of him on the sink. Nadyenka was puzzled by the items inside it, only one of which seemed to be a gun, surrounded by about fifteen accessories. What she was looking at was a Special Forces Peculiar Modifications Kit: a day scope, a laser scope, a leaf sight, a reflex sight, a mini night-vision sight, a quick-attach 40mm grenade launcher mount and vertical handgrip, a quick-attach signature suppressor, even a quick-attach 9-volt flashlight.

But Nadyenka did not stand there meditating on it. When she swelled up against the side of him, Lucas started.

“I’ve always wanted a gun—” she said.

“Jesus Christ,” said Lucas, backing away. “Jesus.”

Nadyenka said nothing, only smiling in her mutedly fervid way.

“You should get one,” Lucas said when he had recovered. “In effect all human advances are firearms advances.”

“I guess so,” said Nadyenka. The absence of romance in Lucas’ statements was intriguing. “Could you show me how to use one of these?”

Lucas blinked. “These aren’t for beginners,” he said. “No.”

Nadyenka tried to pout enticingly. “That isn’t fair.”

Lucas only stared at her in response to this comment, though, cocking his head slightly without comprehension.

“Oh yeah,” he said finally. “There’s a bunch of that trail mix you like in an oatmeal tin in the back of the truck. You should bag some up for breakfast.”

A coquettish response to this statement would have seemed impossible to Lucas. Yet Nadyenka batted her eyelashes with abandon.

“You’re mean,” she said.

Lucas stared. “Seriously,” he said. “It’s good for you.”

“I don’t think Jacqueline will want to stay behind,” Nadyenka said.

“Well,” said Lucas. “There is that.”

“And I don’t want to stay behind either.”

Lucas nodded. Gulped. “Right.”

“Tell me this, Lucas,” Nadyenka said, pressing closer again. “Have you ever tried...Aqua-Tantrism?”

Lucas thought for a moment, blinking. “Yes,” he said. “I have.”

Nadyenka had removed her shirt. Lucas noticed the smooth, compact torso. He admired it, as one admires an anthill.

“Mom?” said MacAbee.

A lot of silence proceeded. Then some bad coughing. “Allo?”

MacAbee frowned. “Mrs. Huffman?”

“Qui est-ce?”

“Mrs. Huffman, it’s Hitch MacAbee.”

She was silent again.

“C’est quoi ça, Eeech?”

“No, it’s Hitch, mom. I’m calling for your daughter, Rita.”

“Marguerite!” said the voice, now rising to a Gallic screech. It was still recognizably the voice of Dolly Huffman, whatever her current form.

MacAbee realized that for about three days he’d felt normal, and that this respite was suddenly closing. And the realization made every thing in MacAbee’s gut start to hurt like he’d been poisoned.

“Qui est-ce que c’est Marguerite?” said Mrs. Huffman.

MacAbee slumped against the face of the filling station which held the phone. “Your daughter, Mom, Rita Huffman. I just wanted—”

“Non. Pas de Marguerite,” said the French voice curtly. “No English.”

“Mom—”

“No English,” Mrs. Huffman repeated.

Across the yellow kitchen of Dolly Huffman’s west Vegas home, at her green Formica kitchen table, sat Rita Huffman. Rita still wore the arts-and-crafts engagement ring, with its large purple gem. She was piecing over Modern Bride.

“Telemarketer?” she said.

“Fucking timeshares—” said Mother Huffman, moving back to her ashtray.

For his part, after he heard the click on the other end of the line, MacAbee stared at the phone for a moment as though it had undergone some transformation in his hand. Then, like a fuse had been lit, he dropped it and sprinted across the lot to where Lucas’ sport-utility sat. MacAbee huddled as he ran, covering his head, for in his mind rockets and ramparts exploded above.

At this time Lucas and Nadyenka were exiting the men’s room.

As he awaited the dental appointment, MacAbee examined his fingerprints for a long time. He found it impossible to stop examining them even as his hygienist undertook the dental excavation, and she repeatedly had to push his arms down. Now in the backseat of Lucas’ sport-utility, MacAbee was doing it again, gazing upon his outstretched digits. Nothing was out of the norm as far as he could tell. Still, if he were schizophrenic, there was little authority in the diagnosis.

MacAbee tried to remember if his mother had taken his temperature orally or by ear or by rectum during his childhood. He couldn’t be sure, and for a while he was stricken with the image of a broken thermometer liberating quicksilver down his ear canal and into his brain, where the circuitry would liquefy and then re-cement in absurd configurations. This is the point of introspection at which MacAbee generally decided to shoot himself.

MacAbee thought about Rita. He sighed.

Jacqueline did not care for the epithet.

“Darling?” she said. This was one of her depressive moments.

“Darling,” Lucas repeated. “You know you have to stay. It’s not going to be safe.”

Jacqueline took a large declamatory bite from her sandwich. The au jus selection was all the Microtel served on Sundays.
“Safety,” said Jacqueline, as she swallowed. “Safety and survival are the pursuits of rabbits and orangutans and paramecia. I choose not to survive. I choose to triumph…”

This was from the introduction to Lucas’ unfinished opus, The Astral Dessert. Aptly cited. Lucas looked to the others.

“MacAbee,” said Lucas. “Will you please look after my wife while I’m gone? Can I make that your personal responsibility? She isn’t feeling well.”

Hitch MacAbee laughed. “You’re crazy.”

“You fix me,” MacAbee said. “Then I’ll stay.”

“Jackie, honey—”

“No,” she said. “That’s a good way of putting it. You fix me and then I’ll stay.”

Lucas sighed.

There were general nods of approval. The late-afternoon crowd extended from the Four Seasons about a quarter-mile down Vegas Boulevard. It was a quiet, very self-controlled assembly, considering its size. The President looked tired and sunless in the shadow of the jewel-like towers that impended around him.

“We’re good,” he said. “We’re alright.”

Inside the Four Seasons, negotiations were ongoing, their outcome unknowable.

“There is nothing peculiar about this moment in History,” said the President. “Read any ancient account. History is what’s peculiar.”

At this point the President’s faced twisted, and he began squinting as though slightly in pain. His mouth had gone slack, and he did not resume speaking. So the crowd turned to look where he looked.

They oohed in dramatic unison. For on the wall of the Tropicana that faced the Strip there were flaming letters spanning several stories. They crackled like thatch, smoking hideously.
WHO IS CERBERUS?
The crowd was moved by the sight. Even the uncontemplative contemplated it, instinctively silent. Guests trapped above the letters began to hang out of windows now, waving and coughing, screaming inaudibly. Sirens kicked up in the distance.

“See?” said the President, wagging a long forefinger. “Do you see?”

It will also do here to explain that the utilitarian nature of Jacqueline and Nadyenka’s relationship was a result of Jacqueline’s progressivism and Nadyenka’s emigratory boot-strappism—that Nadyenka’s caste provided a social (in the sense of “ice cream social”) asset to Jacqueline, the pampered, though outreaching, equalitarian.

“Is something wrong—?” Nadyenka said.

They sat on their opposing twin beds in the glow of two wall-mounted crane lamps.

“I am an incomplete woman,” said Jacqueline.

Nadyenka frowned. “Sweetheart,” she said. “What does that mean?”

Nadyenka remembered to keep smiling. “Right.”

“Only doing it, mind you, to make my gigolo jealous, and I can’t even pull that off. You know, you spend all this time on your hair, your torso, your self-concept...”

“Oh, I know, dear,” said Nadyenka. “I do.”

Jacqueline brought the stainless steel spit down with a weep. The box withholding the furry thing or things became silent.

“I’m ugly and old,” said Jacqueline. “What am I supposed to do?”

It was not exactly true that Jacqueline was ugly and old. It would be truer to say she was beautiful and old. She was bone-thin, striking—her limbs were long and slender, forever bronzed with spray bronzer, draped in organic fabrics and indigenous accoutrements she acquired from Neiman Marcus and elsewhere. But Nadyenka remained silent, and this aggravated Jacqueline’s self-pity, her long fingers coiling tight around the steel skewer. Nadyenka had just begun fearing for her own life when, as though summoned, Hitch MacAbee leaned into their room.

“Knock knock,” he said, the craterous face appearing with a weak smile.

The girls looked up. Jacqueline’s face was streaked, her coif mussed. A postal box sat silently on the floor in front of her, riddled.

“Oh,” said MacAbee. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” He began to retreat.

“No,” Nadyenka said. “It’s fine, come in. What did you need?”
MacAbee peeked back in.

“Oh,” he said. “Nothing. I just noticed I still have Jacqueline’s sleep candle.”

He brandished the purple item.

“Thank you, MacAbee,” said Jacqueline. “Bring it here.”

MacAbee looked askance briefly, then hurried over and set the candle on the nightstand.

“Sorry,” he said again as he turned to go.

As MacAbee passed Jacqueline, the odor of his sweat-ruined poncho lingered over her for an instant—a hint of wet wool.

“Thank you, Hitch,” she said as he reached the door again.

MacAbee stopped without turning around.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and left.

The final component of Jacqueline’s quest was taking form.

“Goodnight, Nadyenka—” she said suddenly.

“Oh. Goodnight.”

Minutes later as they lay in the dark, Jacqueline’s thoughts turned to the goddess Callidwen while she listened for when Nadyenka had fallen asleep. Unfortunately Nadyenka listened for the same, and they both stayed up very late for no reason.

In his bed across the hall, MacAbee was lost in nightmares, as Lucas d’Estime completed his own evening meditation, then quietly masturbated.
“Why is this happening?” MacAbee asked in a strained hiss as the body of Mrs. d’Estime-Auxvasse slid onto his own, bringing him up out of a confusing dream into a confusing wakefulness.

“Shh,” said Jacqueline. “He’ll hear.”

MacAbee shook his head. Logical connections lost themselves in the dark.

“Are you kidding?” whispered MacAbee. “Of course he’ll hear—”

He had to suppress a yelp then as Jacqueline removed his boxer shorts.

“Hold still,” she said.

“Oh, my God,” hissed MacAbee, rolling her off. “Oh, my God. I’m sorry, no. No. This is much too much.”

Grasping his sheet around him, MacAbee stood, yanked the door open and hurried into the hall. Jacqueline followed, laughing.

As the pneumatically-controlled door shut itself again, squeezing out the fluorescent glare of the hallway, Lucas’ eyes opened. He sighed, relieved. His wife’s intention of restoring their relationship had seemed inscrutable and dangerous. Now he knew she had simply come down with a sort of hysteric nymphomania. Probably a pre-menopause of some kind.

Or Time Energy, it didn’t matter. But what a relief—

When Nadyenka appeared in the doorway of his room, Lucas was no longer in it. Filled with a sudden kind of gravity, he’d gone for a walk, and was far out under the Plain State starscape.