Kingdom come

Padraig had been dreaming of Dyna. It was a deep dream, one shrouded in fathoms of nervous babble, unconscious and half-conscious and sub-conscious din. He would not remember it. But it seemed to be a tea party—simple, with a nice service and a glass cafétisserie and nice heavy coffee spoons. Padraig noted the woody sensualness of the odor. It wasn’t tea, it was coffee.

Dyna sat before the coffee table on an art-deco sofa, wild with vertical stripes—legs crossed, sipping. She was twenty and fabulous, with a cigarette and a beehive and the legs of a girl. That made Padraig nine or ten, and he looked down to see the large plasmatic gut on which cocoa was resting, a little belly skin peeping at the bottom of his undersized Polo—bald white flesh like pastry.

“So,” Dyna was saying. “Have a girlfriend?”

And Padraig began crying, still looking down at his gut. The room faded, and as he ascended through the less obscure echelons of his mind Padraig flitted by all the memories and half-memories of the last forty-eight hours—foot ointments, bald spot, coffee table, self-storage protocols; Artie Gunn, with fangs: a handlebar-mustachioed bat—

Padraig was in his small Korean pick-up on a gravel side-road among a great flatness bathed in gold grass. The sun was orange and lateral to the ground. Padraig had pulled over to rest when it was still dark because he hadn’t slept in a long time and because it was an excuse not to see Artie Gunn a bit longer. But the sun was all the way up now. And Dyna was waiting.

Padraig’s little Samsung chattered awake.

Artie Gunn lived in Stull, Kansas.

**

Artie Gunn suffered an hour-long commute each morning in order to live in the wide-open, where he could find cheap land and build his fire temple and conduct his abnormal religious lifestyle in peace. It was no small perk, of course, to live near one of the most significant emanation points of occultic energy in the Western Hemisphere. It attracted all manner of oddities and those in existential distress.

The single room was empty except for a small lamp on a single floating shelf that protruded from the far wall. Its flame threw an odd, sanguine hue—Padraig would have recognized it had he experienced the “sconces” that led down the Stairway of the Unfortunate. Momentarily, as Padraig’s eyes adjusted, there appeared a large and complex relief above the flame. Padraig approached it. He inspected the image. Before a teeming and multifarious background the wood carving pictured a man wearing a thin beard, a simple turban and a sort of conversational smile. The man was not, as far as Padraig could tell, a very imposing creature—nothing like the furnace-eating druid you would imagine as the patron of a “fire temple.” More like a Jesus of sorts, in a lighter mood.

“Zoroaster—” came a creepingly agreeable voice from behind Padraig. “Zarathustra,” it said. “Zarosht.”

Artie’s entrance was like that of any mystic on home turf: sudden, unremarked, then noticed with a start—out of the blackness. Artie stood in a passageway that Padraig had not perceived.

Padraig sighed, looking back to the carving. “Hey, Artie.”

“Do you know what his name means?” Artie said.

Padraig coughed. “Not off the top of my head, Artie.”

“Owner of feeble camels.”

“Oh.” Padraig nodded. “Good.”

“An historically obscure personality, we really don’t know when he lived. The Greeks thought it was about 8,500 years ago. That’s probably a bit much. Still—”

Artie stopped short. Padraig looked over. Artie peered at him in a manner he did not appreciate.

“I’m sorry, Padraig,” Artie said. “What’s happened?”

Padraig felt something getting ready to get lodged in his throat. He resented the sensation. He coughed.

“What’s happened, Padraig?” Artie said, the voice even and gentle.

The two men held each other’s gaze a moment, still as duelers. But it wasn’t too long, for Padraig simply broke down crying.

A lot of people were crying in these endtimes. Surely alternative emotional responses were being tried, but nothing had widely caught on; abject travail threatened to become the only form of self-expression current. This would not surprise anyone who had lived through the early-middle 20XXs, when sarcasm briefly became the only form of emotional expression, aboriginal dance the only form of transportation, and adoption the only form of social interaction. What a time that was.

If you wished to chat with the grocer down the street, or simply buy a bunch of radish from him, you were obliged to caper and cartwheel to the nearest phone, dial up a social worker, and in the steeliest ironic tones, and without saying exactly what you meant, imply that you desired the neighborhood grocer Karl Pfeffermeyer as your ward and dependant for the afternoon. The inconvenience did not stop there, of course, for you had to be lucky enough to have submitted each form correctly, which then had to be processed without incident. Finally there could be nothing in your permanent record to disqualify you for the transfer. You had to be very careful, during that brief period, not to sully your name in any bureaucratic sphere, or else risk becoming less attractive to potential adopters. For there was no other way to remain part of society, and many of those with past felonies, bad credit and so on were hived off and starved to death.

But what a time.

Cultural manifestations of this sort arise from two things: geography and catastrophe. Cultural peculiarities always resemble cultural predicament. The question of the End of the World was not when people would stop weeping, indeed, but when the extemporaneous tooth-gnashing would strike up.
There is a lot of shame in having been dead, Lucas noticed. Something so utterly corporeal, like the worst possible embarrassed nudity, like the worst carnal predilection exposed, utterly indelible from history: like overheard slander or discovered masturbation. The filthiest creeping self-disgust, the stink of mortality in every cell, like an open secret. All the flora and fauna within your body whose sole responsibility is your decomposition awake in the temporary death—to a ravenous, carnival atmosphere within the corpse—and if they must sleep again they sleep uneven and aggrieved—one eye held open.

Two days after altercating with and being slain by the awful dog-beast many fathoms beneath the Earth, Lucas woke up in a Kansas soy field about a quarter mile from the unfortunate stairway. His body was stiff, as though emerging from an over-long sleep. He stood with a groan. He wore black boots, black wool slacks and a black turtleneck of some thin, durable-ish polycotton. In the near distance Lucas perceived the chapel and churchyard, which further indicated the highway. Immediately he began in this direction. As he did so, Lucas located a note in his right front pants pocket. It was printed on a rough, porous material of pinkish translucence. He stopped and read:

C.
Lucas shook free of the message. He recalled his encounter with the affable monstrosity only dimly, images lacking detail as though viewed through the wrong side of a lens. Lucas strained toward them. His brain seemed to know better and kept them partitioned. He lifted up his shirt to find long, rubbery pink scars crisscrossing his abdomen in a rude X. Lucas itched it, stumbling on. Now he noticed that he seemed to be rattling with each step. Again, he stopped. Digging down in the large cargo pocket of the black pants, he found a small orange bottle. Wrapped around it was a kind of Post-it note, also probably composed of human parchment:

Tell that girl I said she’s hot.

C.
Lucas tore the note off the bottle. He sighed.

It was getting dark out. The cold grass crunched with regularity beneath Lucas’ big boots as he continued. His legs were warming up and loosening, and the ache was turning to an atrophied burn. When he arrived at the graveyard Lucas walked directly to the Stairway of the Unfortunate. He pulled back the trapdoor, familiar ancient vapors greeting him, the smell of cobwebs and old casks. When Lucas dropped in the Nulepsin, the bottle went bouncing and chattering down until out of hearing. Lucas felt a rugged clarity of loneliness, a cool expansion in the veins, a slight gray-scaling of vision. Then, when Lucas turned from the yawning and hideous stairway, up from the unconsidered stones and all at once Jacqueline rose to Lucas’ face—as though he had stepped on a rake.

Lucas screamed and fell over.
Moments later the reunited pair stood rubbing their arms and chests, for they were suddenly very cold. Jacqueline had said very little, and now she said nothing: a wave of tears and apology waited behind every utterance. She was shrunken, gripping herself. Her hair had turned a sheer chromium.

“I like it,” Lucas was saying, jaunty, vigorous. “I do. Gray hair is like...instant class.”

He laughed. She didn’t smile, but continued clasping herself, swaying slightly. They’d come to Lucas’s sport-utility vehicle, which waited where he left it beside the chapel approach. Lucas had no keys.

“What are we going to do?” Jacqueline said.

She watched Lucas surveying the dusky near-horizon. She saw his clarity of purpose, the absence of fear—her indefatigable. It made her feel guilty and pathetic, like a thief.

“There,” he said.

Jacqueline looked where Lucas pointed, and in the distance, filtering up in the dim, stood a red body of light. Not a beam, but a kind of suffusion, a ramification of tiny light whiskers brushing the cloud cover—

“What is it?” said Jacqueline.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Habitation.”

With a tightly gripped chunk of gravel Lucas walked over and smacked out the back window of his truck. The swinging motion put a waking thrill through his shoulders and back, a memory of Yoga and Defendo. He smiled over at Jacqueline, though she was still watching the red light. Jacqueline could not say what it reminded her of. It made her teeth and fingernails wiggle in their homes.

Lucas pulled out his old suitcase and opened it, revealing knit shirts and flax-fiber linen trousers. He unzipped the mesh pouch that lined the top of the case and pulled out his leather flip-portfolio. He took a set of clothes and retrieved an oatmeal tin half-filled with granola. He gave it a shake, yogurty clusters of grain tumbling around inside.

“Hungry?” he said.

He smiled at his wife again. She did not seem quite able to look at him.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, still oblique in posture.

Jacqueline unzipped her beige-green hemp rolling suitcase and removed a simple blue dress. Thus, with the totalitarian-style block haircuts they had received, in their black boot-to-chin uniforms, Lucas and Jacqueline began down the small highway, munching on restorative granola—suddenly terribly aware of their empty guts, violated-feeling as though scraped out. As they came closer and closer to the red light and what would be the fire temple home of death therapist Artie Gunn, Jacqueline began to shake. As Lucas’ stride became looser and more upright, Jacqueline’s became stiffer with each step, as though at some level her body was questioning her judgment about the situation she was about to put it in. But Lucas tugged her along optimistically and soon they were standing before Artie’s short approach.

“It’s hell,” Jacqueline said as they stood before the light-suppurating hovel, the rays hued as though beaming through a finger tip.

Lucas smiled.

“We’ll see—” he said.

They went forward, having made no notice of a large covered oxcart sitting further down the road from Artie’s property, and had been for two weeks—nor the minimal glow of dials and surveillance screens—nor the bulky shadows of Abnormal Vigilance agents within.
Death therapist Artie Gunn and Neo-holist Lucas d’Estime had met several years before at an Ideological Therapy symposium in Glastonbury entitled “Me, My Self.” Artie’s paper, “Living to See: A Survivor’s Survival Guide,” was received well. As was Lucas’ autobiographical reading from Finding God: A Life.
God is an odd duck, I realized—just as lonely and misunderstood as I am. I thought: Maybe God is looking down on the same moon I’m looking up on, wondering if anyone will ever really “get” us...
Artie and Lucas did not personally meet till near the end of the week when they coincidentally enrolled in the same titular colonicity workshop. They complimented each other’s presentations and briefly exchanged meta-wellness conference data—birthplace, faith tradition, opinion of Freud’s legacy, and so on. Lucas had become far more prolific in the trade since their meeting, however, and as they stood on the packed-mud floor of Artie’s temple, Lucas could no longer place Artie.

“My God,” Artie said. “What an honor.”

“Not at all,” Lucas said, coughing.

“I can hardly believe I’m looking at you again,” Artie said.

This caused Lucas to stop. “Be not faithless,” he said and coughed, laughing at what had tumbled out of his upbringing. “I need you to believe it.”

“And who is this?”

“This is my wife,” said Lucas. “Jacqueline.”

Jacqueline blinked. She gripped her husband’s arm. She was furtive, eyes low, mouth taut.

“Where are you two coming from?” Artie said.

Lucas mouth opened wide for a moment. At first he could not answer, but gave a look piteous in purport—as of bowel distress.

“Down the road,” he said.

Artie nodded. “What can I do?”

That night—which was the night of Dyna Mitchell’s installation at Peerless Self-Storage, about an hour’s drive east—the d’Estimes bedded down in the guts of Artie’s elaborate conventicle, on glorious silk cushions of Arabesque needlepoint, frenzied with geometry. For several moments Lucas and Jacqueline lay together in silence, a low oil lamp throwing jelly-orange light in the corner.

“Lucas,” Jacqueline said, as she scanned the dark ceiling, as though mapping the blackness.

He looked over.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember anything?”

“About what?”

“About yesterday.”

“Right up until...” he said, “until Cerberus got upset. That I remember.”

She nodded. “Anything else?”

“I remember having the impression of being dead for awhile. I guess I was.”

“You were.”

Lucas nodded. “But I also remember feeling like something good had happened in our relationship.”

“Yours and mine.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Like we were thirty again.”

Jacqueline nodded. “Yeah.”

“Does that correspond to something that I don’t know about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you feel like something good happened in our relationship?”

Jacqueline was quiet again.

“I don’t know.”

Lucas looked at her. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re acting like a corpse,” he said. “Ever since we’ve been here. What’s the matter?”

Jacqueline continued watching the walls, like the boundaries of the room were constricting by tiny degrees and had to be monitored.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

Lucas nodded, leaning back. He spent a moment combing over possible ways of interpreting this statement. He gave up.

“What does that mean?” he said.

Jacqueline cleared her throat. “It means there is a human child in my midsection.”

Lucas’ interpretive gears whizzed and bonked another moment.

“A human child?”

Jacqueline nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s human.”

Lucas sat up. For a moment his eyes jogged back and forth as he chased the information around, seeking its proper alignment.

“A human child.”

“I believe so,” said Jacqueline.

“Whose is it?” Lucas said, breathless. “I mean, have you...” He coughed, a rare prudishness clumping his throat. “Have you known anyone recently?”

This question was just absurd enough to irk Jacqueline out of lethargy. She pushed up on one arm, the lamplight up behind her like a guttering star in the dark.

“Have I known anyone?” she said.

Lucas blinked. “Yeah.”

Jacqueline sighed. “Do you remember the Church of the Creatrix Survival Hike?”

Lucas thought. “No,” he said. “When was it?”

“Three years ago,” Jacqueline said. “To participate you had to have at least a partial hysterectomy.”

“Oh,” Lucas said. He paused here, as though nailing down an elusive thesis. “Which means...”

“Which means I don’t have a uterus. At least I didn’t used to.”

“Oh,” Lucas said again. “I’m sorry.”

But it would not be accurate to call Lucas “sorry” in this moment. Rather, something warm and happy was touching down in his gut, some pleasant agglomeration that lacked essence and complexion.

“Does a uterus grow back?”

Jacqueline lay back flat, sighing. “Not that I’m aware of.”

Lucas sighed back. “We really don’t know each other well enough,” he said.

“I know,” Jacqueline said.

“It’s my fault.”

“That’s true. It’s also my fault,” Jacqueline said. “But...”

Suddenly she was crying, her voice going husky and musical, and Lucas scooted closer to her on the cushions, unprepared for this phenomenon.

“But here we are,” she said. “Because you died to save me—of course I feel completely guilty about that, and—” She sucked air, with an inward shriek. “And now there’s a baby, which I’ve wanted forever, except it has to be some demon’s baby or something, and I don’t even get to enjoy it because the world is ending.”

Lucas nodded.

“Your mood makes more sense, then.”

The only thing he could think to do after saying something this inexpert was to hold his wife, and this he seemed to do perfect, as though he remembered it exactly, and Jacqueline cleaved to him like a cub. She continued crying and he continued searching for anything reasonable to utter.

“What if the world doesn’t end?” he said after a moment.

Jacqueline smeared some tears back with the ribbed cuff of her shirt, taking a loud sniff as she did.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what if I can arrange it so the world doesn’t have to end?”

Jacqueline sniffed again, calmer. “You’d do that for me?”

“Of course.”

“I thought you said the world ends all the time.”

Lucas nodded.

“It does,” he said. “So it shouldn’t be a big deal. Do you think I can do it?”

Jacqueline smiled up, puffy and overwrought.

“Yes,” she said.

For awhile they were quiet.

“Did you...know a demon at some point?” Lucas asked.

Jacqueline shook her head, rubbing a wet cheek on Lucas’ chest.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Lucas blinked. “Well,” he said. “Did you know the Holy Ghost?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never even been that religious.”

Lucas nodded. “Well...” he said, pulling his wife against him again.

Lucas viewed the End of It All in his mind, up before him a silent, Earth-inhaling maelstrom, one tiny checkbox on the Almighty To Do List.

His skin remembered Hell—

“Then everything is possible.”
The Abnormal Vigilance was a psychological outreach on behalf of the Federal Government. It was commissioned to help clarify, through Ideological Therapy, the first-principles of those of its citizens prone to absurd happenings. The father of the scheme, a Dr. Fulton Grok, had convinced his colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control that the only way to restore existential normalcy was to undermine the basis of abnormalcy: cognitive dissonance. That is, human beings’ tendency to disagree with themselves about the premises of experience. Thus, if the troubled individual could be desensitized to contradiction, they would recognize that absurdity is basically non-problematic. That is: nobody is sane, as such. And nothing has ever been normal.

They would be, in Dr. Grok’s incredible words, “immune to existence—”

To this end, the Vigilance was acting as a kind of psychiatric form of Endtime law enforcement, its agents recognizable by their flamboyant “Secret Agent” ball caps and their reversion to philosophical cant in otherwise familiar law enforcement crises. Tactically speaking, the Vigilance was a logical extension of psychic murder investigations and psychological warfare. It was administered by a combination of FBI agents, mystics, and occult or occult-adjunct professionals—yogis, theologians, gambling columnists, wise homeless and so on.

Various committee members at the Centers for Disease Control had queried whether the program might eventually do more harm than good, releasing into the world a lot of deconstructed individuals who could not be guaranteed to reconstitute their worldviews. It was widely agreed, nonetheless, that extremes were appropriate and many eventualities beyond immediate consideration. Few would find it surprising, in fact, when Dr. Fulton Grok turned out to be a former municipal subsecretary from Baltimore—a “Doctor” (DBA) of Sports Management and Organizational Behavior.

Lucas cleared his throat. “Trouble sleeping?”

Artie turned, grinning. “Not as such.”

Lucas lowered himself to sit cross-legged in the grass beside Artie’s perch, which was something like the footstool of a fashionable cedar patio chair. The two colleagues gazed.

“So,” Lucas said after a moment. “About time.”

Artie nodded. “Just about.”

They gazed.

“You don’t suppose it’s negotiable.”

Artie looked over. “The End?”

“Yeah, it came to me last night. Do you know Cerberus?”

Artie thought. “Of him.”

“Well,” Lucas said. “He’s supposed to be this monster, you know. But when you meet him he’s really not a bad guy. He’s had a dreary lot, and he’s dealt with it maybe not the best way. But talk to him five minutes with a little compassion and he’s a cream puff. He just wants to be one of the guys.”

Artie nodded. “That’s interesting.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I was thinking if I could get some face time with Satan, you know...”

“With Satan.”

“Yeah, Satan. I was thinking maybe all he needs is a kindred soul—just to know one exists.”

Here Artie laughed, though his face became tired again quickly.

“I don’t think the End of the World is negotiable.”

“Well,” Lucas said again. “But I’m not a strict-interpretationalist.”

Artie thought about it.

“Just the same—” he said.

The sky was glowing up in front of them now, a protean blue that was about to turn green or purple.

“I remember you now,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry I didn’t before.”

Artie shook his head. “It’s fine.”

“I’ve been on drugs,” Lucas said.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “Two years.”

“What were you on?”

“Dopamine blocker.”

Artie thought about it. “Were you psychotic?”

Lucas shrugged.

“Not to oversimplify it,” he said.

Artie laughed.

The moguls sat until it was fully light, around which point Artie went inside and made a simple breakfast of loaves and tea and caught a cat-nap of about twenty minutes before the arrival of Padraig Mitchell, aggrieved husband. Lucas and Jacqueline were out in Artie’s barn compiling supplies when Padraig arrived. They were hunting among Artie’s cache of twenty-first century accoutrements—suits, watches, luggage, laptop, espresso machine—

“Never need any of it again,” the death therapist said sleepily, happily, his red and black silk robe shishing on the dark floor behind him.

“Got a real job.”

Artie nodded.

“I know it isn’t the answer you expected, Padraig, but I feel it’s the right one. And if you examine yourself I suspect it’s something you felt even before you arrived here.”

Padraig trembled.

“Jesus, Artie, do you even listen to yourself? I’m serious.”

“I deal with bereaved people on a daily basis,” Artie said. “And I will tell you that beating grief is actually not complicated. In fact, it’s a one-step process. Yet it’s rarely quick, and it’s never easy.” Artie looked around them. “It’s why monasteries get built.”

Padraig shook off the speech. “I’m here to talk about my wife, Artie, who is currently a piece of furniture—when, by the way, we were just going to give our relationship a second try. Are you saying it’s incurable?”

“I’m not saying it’s incurable,” Artie said. “But it’s not something you want cured by a mortal like me. What you’re talking about is a complete redesign of your wife, and I’m not qualified. Nor, I would guess, is anyone else of this planet.”

Padraig was looking around the room, wishing that there were something more interesting to distract him on the half-lit walls. His eyes came to rest on the simple red flame.

Artie continued. “All the grieving person really has to do is decide to let himself feel the things his biology is telling him not to. Most importantly—”

“Yeah, thanks, Artie.”

Artie shook his head. He chuckled.

“That’s the thing about teachability....” he said. Padraig’s head jerked around. Artie was smiling. “It can’t be taught.”

For a moment Padraig stood frozen, considering the possibility that he was not teachable. The feeling that came with the possibility reminded him why he always threw it out.

“So,” Artie was saying. “You do exactly what you think is right.”

Padraig nodded. “Thanks for the tip.”

Artie took a deep breath, underslept.

“Also,” he said. “I was wondering if you could take my friends back to the Interstate on your way out.”

Padraig looked up. Darkening the temple entry were a man and woman, the man commando-ish and dark, the woman tall beside him. Each held an overstuffed duffel bag.

“This is Lucas and Jacqueline,” Artie said. “They can rent a car in Big Springs.”

Padraig frowned. “You’re done with me?”

“I’m done with you.”

Padraig thought. “Why don’t you take them?”

Artie smiled, truly, fully present in this moment—giving off light like a sacrament.

“I have to wait.”