Kingdom come

Daniel Murrain’s first challenge upon arriving in Las Vegas had been deciding why he came. His sister had been cruelly transformed. There had been a star. The next step he couldn’t quite work out. So he roamed. And watched.

Daniel had been to Vegas many times. The streets were more densely populated than normal, he noticed, crowds hugging the boundaries of each beeping, glittering structure, the way they turn out for demolitions in this city: now evenly distributed along each edifice. The patrons neither pressed on one another nor shrunk from contact, but milled, as though in place, with the same absence of purpose or nerve Daniel felt himself under. It was dark, more than one in the morning.

Before Circus Circus Daniel encountered a yellow readerboard topped by a blinking green arrow announcing: “$1 Heineken for Players.” He entered immediately. He wandered the gaming floor twenty minutes. Having escaped various dead-end slot machine aisles, and finding only the Reservations desk, the Circus Buffet, and the Reservations desk once again, he gave up looking for the beer and began to wonder if he was ever going to escape the building at all. This is when he encountered the Heineken Kiosk: a bored-looking gentlemen hunkering down in a luminous green ten-foot fiberglass reproduction of a beer can. A small placard upon the counter explained: “$1 - 8 oz. bottles.”

Daniel promptly consumed twenty of the gem-green vessels, at which point an attendant approached and requested that Daniel begin to gamble. The creators of all the lager Daniel had just consumed, the attendant explained, profited not from sales but from slot machine points.

That is irrelevant even if true, Daniel meant to say.

“Good will....” was all he could expel.

He saw where a sap hung inside the attendant’s jacket like a rubber blue penis, bobbing like a pendant.

“Yes, good will,” the attendant was saying. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I mean—” Daniel said, and he may have a crossed a good deal of the gaming floor during the lacuna in this statement, considering the tilting stream of visual and auditory cues racing past and the firm herding of the attendant. “Good faith. Good will toward man.”

“Yes,” the attendant said, dropping Daniel on a stool. “Exactly right—”
From here on Daniel remembered one long stare down into his wallet, as though requiring eternity to fathom its contents. He remembered having one hundred dollars. He remembered feeding the machine endlessly. It was the $2 I DREAM OF JEANIE contraption, with attending sound cues from the TV program, pink malevolent kitsch drifting in and out of Daniel’s awareness like a disorienting horror score. Daniel remembered owning $2500 briefly. He remembered the attendant passing over him in the din, like a soundless owl waiting politely for a vermin to finish a morsel. Daniel fed the machine. He remembered his waitress—Demeter, inventor of sex—mother of the corn, bone-white Amazon, all legs and smile, all cocktails....

The sunlight fell like a descending foot. Daniel looked around him. Remembering why he’d come to Las Vegas, Daniel set off on the nameless old pavement without another doubt. Daniel Murrain had come to Las Vegas to hurt Jesus Christ. Mentally, the way Jesus had hurt him, he felt.

Reaching the city again, Daniel stopped in Queen of Mercy parish. In the small front office he found a man named Father Burger, S.J. Fr. Burger was eating a banana with slow enjoyment and savor, the peel spread on a paper towel before him, a large smile flexing his face back as he chewed. He made Daniel wait till he was finished.

Fr. Burger was eighty-one. All of him was a chalky absence of pigmentation, from his sanguine pink flesh to the silky cowl of hair brushed to uniform delicacy over his ears. He spoke clearly and loudly, as though from depths; with each syllable you got the impression that his face was coming toward yours, as in a head-butt. Fr. Burger had already offered to knock Daniel down if he heard the word “motherfucker” again.

“I don’t mind the word “Fuck”,” said Fr. Burger. “It has an interesting pedigree, actually.”

“Really—”

Fr. Burger, in these final years, seemed to have developed a mild obsession with etymology.

“Yes,” he said. “Old as, if not much older than, the word “Jesus.” Much older than “Catholic”.”

“Of course,” Daniel said.

“But I cannot abide the marriage of that word and “mother,” the finest word in all language.”

Daniel nodded. They were sitting in the vestibule, its thick knotted-wool rug exuding warmth and silence. Now Fr. Burger stood.

“Father,” Daniel said. “If you could bring it around to my question.”

Fr. Burger was hobbling away now, quickly. Daniel wondered if the man didn’t play at frailty just to put his auditor at a disadvantage. His long body was lean rather than hollow, the hands slender, without extruded bones or veins. Stooping did not seem natural to him, and he covered ground swiftly with invisible steps.

“I see no reason to answer this question,” said the Father: “‘Is it possible to hurt Jesus’ feelings’.”

“Well,” Daniel said, following the old man into the low-lit church. “Is it?”

“Sshh—” said Fr. Burger. He did not slow down.

Parishioners dotted the interior. They were silent. They looked at their hands. They looked at the floor. A few looked quietly upon the west rose window, the final glorification of Christ outlined upon, Christ among saints and pals, Judas Iscariot having made his quietus a moment earlier. It was a vigil, an indefinitely observed moment of silence. But there was also a bomb-shelter mentality in the church, a tense solitude, punctuated by a mildly obese lady of about fifty perching among the pews with a Remington Man-Stopper shotgun across her knees.

“Mary Claret,” said Fr. Burger as they passed into the morning chapel. “Husband left two days ago. The poor thing—”

“Father.”

Father Burger’s pace slowed now as he came to the altar. He turned and leaned on it, clearing his throat.

“Yes, my child. You can hurt the Lord’s feelings. People do it constantly.”

Daniel shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I need to acutely hurt His feelings. Psychologically.”
“Go kill yourself, son. That’ll do it.”

Daniel stopped.

“No,” he said. “First of all I can’t. I’ve tried several times.”

“Some things are worth keeping at.”

Daniel laughed. “Father—”

“Listen, Daniel. Go and make one thing right. You go—today, tomorrow—sometime before the world’s gone—and you fix one thing. And if you don’t feel any different, you come back and I’ll tell you how to hurt God’s feelings. I’m expert.”

Daniel blinked. Fr. Burger glowed white beside the gilt monstrance: like sun and moon.

“Fix one thing,” Daniel said.

Fr. Burger nodded.

“Try that. If you can prove you are capable of improving the universe which you inhabit and which inhabits you, you have done a tiny version of what God accomplished during that most eventful week in Genesis.”

Daniel blinked again.

“Alright,” he said.

“Alright,” said Fr. Burger, and began his high-octane shuffle back to the church.

“I’m sorry I didn’t meet you till now, Fr. Burger,” Daniel said, hurrying to follow. “Maybe I’d have been Catholic.”

Fr. Burger continued away. His voice disappeared into the further house of God.

“Small miracles—” he cried.

Nadyenka confused Daniel Murrain, surprised him and hurt his feelings, none of which was trivial or within the norm. She had assailed him psychologically.

Now from Vegas he called the d’Estime household. Again their answering machine crackled to life among the torched rubble of Rancho Ranchero, like an intercom perched in a ruined alter-universe. The voice of Daniel Murrain—founder of the Ethical Reference-Frame (See his eponymous doctoral thesis The Multipurpose Heretic), refiner of the Comparison-Comparison—Daniel’s voice slid from the box in its nasal, moribund, sneakingly ironic tone (See “Irony on Irony, Irony Again: Speaking in the Fifth-Person”; cf. “Lifeboat Economics and Mutually Assured Discomfort: The Virtue of Not Holding Elevators”)—

Hey...
Daniel sniffed.
If Nadyenka’s there, can she call me?

I’m at the Queen of Mercy Parish. Las—
At this point in Ft. Worth a hulking blue frog demon in a Norman helm and glinting spaulders annihilated the tiny white answering machine with his halberd. Having done, he began swinging the enormous weapon above his head, its razor-tipped pike whirring like a cricket, sliding into harmony with his wail. He then resumed his patrol, noshing intermittently from a macrobiotic care package—whole-wheat zucchini bread and a thermos of sweet whole-barley miso.

Finally Daniel called Nadyenka’s older sister, Asya. Asya lived in Novosibirsk, Siberia. Daniel entered Nadyenka’s credit card number carefully, waiting through a series of clicks and differing ring tones, each progressively more distorted, before he heard the tired voice.

“Zdraste.”

“Asya,” Daniel said.

There was a long silence here, mediated by sibilant intercontinental white noise.

“Daniel,” she said.

“You remember me,” Daniel said.

They’d met once in Ft. Worth. For the length of her visit Asya had slept in the master bedroom with her sister and Daniel slept in front of the television. Asya spoke a deliberate contact-English and was not disposed to cobbling together lengthy utterances. With Daniel in particular.

“Yes,” she said.

“Hmm,” Daniel said. “Cool.”

This judgment did not merit a return utterance.

“Anyway,” Daniel said. “I was wondering if you’d heard from Nadyenka, recently.”

Again silence, as though to a quiz question. The line sssssssed and bhgbghbghed, whispery, little conversations in other cosmos.

“I didn’t,” Asya said.

“Okay.”

Dan coughed. Asya interrupted him when he went to speak again.

“She left you,” Asya said, louder, a musicality in her tone. You could hear her smiling slightly with her hard, thin, wine-colored mouth.

“Yeah,” Daniel said.

“Good,” Asya said.

“But—”

He considered it.

“Well,” Daniel said. “Would you tell me if she had called?”

Now there was the longest silence thus far, as though this answer was particularly modal and complex.

“No,” Asya said.

Daniel laughed.

“Tell me this, Asya. Is the world ending the there too?”

“Yes.”

Short silence—

“Yes.”

“Well, if you talk to your sister, would you tell her something for me?”

“Would you tell her Daniel said he’s sorry for basically everything he ever did? Most of the bad things were me.”

Asya sighed, pinched.

“I can.”

“If you promise, Daniel Murrain, not to go in heaven.”

“What does that mean?”

“If my family come to heaven and you are there...”

“Ah, sure,” Daniel said. “That’s fine. I won’t go in.”

Then Asya was again quiet and Daniel didn’t know if she felt they were done.

“Good,” she said.
Lucas and Jacqueline stopped in the outskirts of Las Vegas at a place called the Cash Inn. The inn-keeper, Brad, had refused Lucas several times, pretending to check and recheck for vacancies he knew did not exist with unerring stiffness.

“All we need is a place to lay down for the night,” Lucas repeated. “Anything.”

“I understand that, boss, okay,” said the mildewed concierge, not looking up from the screen. “But the world’s ending. There’s almost nowhere to sleep in Vegas right now.”

Lucas nodded.

“The star.”

“That’s right, the star,” said Bradley, scrolling.

Lucas smiled. “God likes to squeeze in symbolism wherever it’ll fit.”

Brad snorted, nodding. Then he froze, and slowly looked up.

“Wait,” Brad said. “I think I know you, boss.”

“Where from?”

Brad ducked under the counter suddenly. For a moment he dug, the sound of things shifting and falling with clunks, of unfiled things, loose forms and empty binders—Brad suddenly wheezing with excitement. Finally he stood again and held aloft a dog-eared paperback:

Terminus Cosmology: A Primer.

Lucas nodded. “Ah.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brad said. He huffed, blowling a foam-string onto the monochrome computer screen. “You must be a celebrity right now.”

“Well,” Lucas said. “I’m semi-retired.”

Brad laughed. “You out here to save the world?”

Lucas laughed back. He winked.

Brad squealed. “How many beds did you need?”

“One,” Lucas said. “You do have a vacancy, then?”

Brad did something here with his head that was both shaking and nodding, like he was trying to keep something balanced on top of it. His eyes returned to the screen.

“Sort of.”

Suite 14a was the finest in the building, Brad had explained, with separate living and dining rooms, a full kitchen, a large television, and a private patio. Un fortunately it had hosted a brutal murder two days previous. A big gorilla-ish demon named Solomon Khyrg had been axed to death and further defiled, according to Brad, by a process that began in the bedroom and proceeded to the kitchen sink. There was a young woman present at the time. Discovered-adultery was the motivation, a human-demon-human love triangle. Half of the Cash Inn maid staff had been recruited for the clean-up. Thereafter they got hardship-pay for the six hours of scrubbing and flushing they subjected the room to. Then the pale, traumatized illegals were given the rest of human history off to be with their families.

By the time Lucas and Jacqueline entered, suite 14a had resumed its former odor, that of dumped ashtrays and Carpet Fresh. Lucas bounced on the mattress. It made a rusty chirp, smelling of moldy cantaloupes, which it had for decades immemorial. Lucas put all the pillows together, making a sort of throne for his pregnant wife and went in to shower.

Lucas showered and shaved. Cockroaches washed out and drowned in the toilet when he flushed. When he remerged, carefully drying the inside and outside of his ears, Jacqueline

JacqeJ was still in the folding chair.

“Jacqueline,” Lucas said.

“Yes.”

“I love you,” Lucas said.

“I love you too,” Jacqueline said, not looking up.

“Tomorrow I have to go. Into town.”

“I know,” she said.

Lucas sighed.

“And you’re pregnant,” he said.

She nodded. “So it would seem.”

“With God knows what.”

Jacqueline glanced up from the page now. “God knows.”

Lucas sighed again.

“Lucas,” Jacqueline said. She lowered the book

“Yes.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m tired of being pawned off?”

“Now it has.”

“Or that there isn’t much quality time left to be had in the Universe?”

Lucas nodded.

“That’s true.”

Jacqueline looked at the book, one of Lucas’ first publications. It was bent and greasy with hand-oil, the corners worn-off with repeat use.

“I’d forgotten how good this was,” Jacqueline said.

Lucas laughed. “Thanks.”

““The Universe is expendable”,” Jacqueline said, peering at the yellowed page. “Time is expendable. Human memory is expendable. Existence will come due. It is indeed bizarre, it is the form of all miracles, that anything desirable ever occurs. That there is anything with which we’d rather not part”.”

Jacqueline’s elbows were cocked atop her now-enormous anterior compartment. She looked up, swiping a tear.

“When you die, I’m not going to be somewhere else.”

Lucas nodded. “Alright.”

She stood. Instinctively, he stood. She took his chin. Her face was rosy, dulcet, hallowed: Queen-of-Mercy-like.

“When I die,” Jacqueline said. “It’s going to be in your company.”

“That’s a little morbid,” Lucas said.

She nodded. “But appropriate.”

Lucas kissed her.

“Okay, then.”

On the bed Lucas laid out his speech-notes for the bygone “Beautiful American Film Festival.” Now he was annotating them for the proposed conversion of Satan: from doctrinally instantiated recompense-bringer to New Age Path-seeker. Lucas highlighted and bracketed.

Here Lucas intended to bring the message home for the Prince of Darkness, whose sense of complex personal inadequacy is well known to theology and literature.

Jacqueline turned on the television, noshing peanut clusters from the minibar. Lucas lay on his back, scanning and rescanning his notes for awhile. Then he heard something on the television that made him stop, and he looked up to check himself. What he saw then made him sit up so violently he slid off the bed and bumped onto on the floor.

Papers scattered. Jacqueline laughed.

The television displayed a picture of Satan. Thoroughly slain. The footage said: “Jan 4, 3:16am” in the right-hand corner. The rolling caption identified the body. From the current angle it looked like a hacked-up Clydesdale, face-down. Just then two Abnormal Vigilance agents were working to push the giant corpse over, and when it splayed open you heard reporters and camerapeople gasp.

Satan’s anterior was riddled with enormous gashes, as though inflicted with a spade. It was streaked and matted, dunked in gore. People were praying and cursing.

“Shit,” said Lucas, leaning forward, drawn toward the streaming caption like a lure.
Prince of Light stabbed twenty-three times by unknown assailant — Las Vegas Gaming Operators’ Counsel “grieves”; declares Entertainment Representative Tot Tot Maddock Emperor of Known Universe, Pro Tem —
Developing
“ALL OATHS,” the killers had carved in long uneven gouges along the great horse-beast’s wiry chest.

“Shit,” Lucas said again.

All down the Boulevard the blinking and beeping and other forms of solicitation had gone quiet for the eulogy about to be read. They would resume in full after the ceremony. The Gaming Operators’ Counsel had organized a number of remembrances: Bally’s typically inane light board depicted an American Flag rippling at half-mast, the boats of Treasure Island had a battery of salutatory cannon fire prepared, and the incongruous overhead canopy of the “Freemont Experience” showed an immense live feed of the proceedings—as Elvises and Tina Turners, pimps and pornography solicitors shuffled about in funeral drab.

The mood was turbulent and dark. History had gone off-script again, and the promised catastrophe continued evading interpretation.

Up front sat Jim Johns the Antichrist, regal and profound in black Ralph Lauren. Nadyenka Czillicz sat beside him. She smiled, squeezing the hand of her fiancé with sympathy.

A lightning courtship had preceded.

From Kansas City they flew to San Francisco. For two days they tripped up and down the coast like old royalty, making love on a purloined jumbo jet, the interior of which Jim Johns had renovated so that it might have been the inside of a small condo. They had parties on it with local celebrities. They got drunk in the Space Needle. Jim Johns proposed to Nadyenka as they viewed cresting orca off the Queen Charlottes.

“It never seemed reasonable,” he said, “that there could be anyone....”

The sentence trailed off, both from emotion and from the fact that it was already correct, could not probably be improved.

“I feel the same,” Nadyenka said.

She saw the ring. They both wept.

Now Satan was dead. The uncertainty had ratcheted back up—everybody felt it.

“At a time like this,” philosophized the eulogist whom the Operator’s Counsel had appointed, “I admit there is nothing good to say.”

There was a New Jersiness to the man’s enunciation, subtly incongruous with the gravity of the proceedings.

“It is a great human mystery, of course, that an event this common and indubitable is the one for which we feel most entitled to explanation and redress—when there is none necessary, and none forthcoming...”

Beside Nadyenka there grieved a creature taking the form of a razorback boar being engorged by an enormous reticulated python. The snake portion of the creature was a magnificent dark green with recurrent inlays of black and gold, like the burnished floor of some wonderful bazaar. The boar portion had squeezed into a tuxedo jacket. Its name was Adolpho. Adolpho reached over and pawed Jim’s shoulder with sympathy.

“I’m so sorry,” Adolpho slavered.

Jim didn’t know the un-being, but he smiled.

“Thank you—” he said.

“So impenetrably bizarre are the whims of the Almighty,” the thick, Jersey-ish eulogizer Tot Tot Maddock was saying. “They demonstrate the limited usefulness of words. The limited usefulness of feeling. The limits of thought...”

Jim Johns was pained. He was pale. He had expected no emotional overflow from the event of Satan’s passing. Even now he could give it no philosophical content. Only obscure internal pain, as though stirred by a ghost.

Nadyenka reached up and pecked his cheek. It was tear-wet.

“Death is the true inversion: for only in the final absence of life, is that great dream-store of meaning totally, unbearably appreciable—”

“I have to kill that man,” said the Antichrist.

Nadyenka looked to the stage where Jim was looking. She choked.

“I understand,” she said.

“Father—”

Fr. Burger shushed Daniel, leaning forward to increase the volume slightly without looking over. Daniel saw Satan lying as though in state. He heard a New Jersey accent dispensing a kind of pseudo-existential eulogy.

“...For death does not harm the dead,” said the broad gentleman. “It proves the living.”

Applause roared in. Fr. Burger turned the sound down. He looked up.

“You’re back,” he said.

Daniel nodded. “I tried to change one thing,” he said. “I couldn’t get started.”

Fr. Burger stared at him. “What did you try?”

“I tried to look up my ex-girlfriend and apologize for some things,” Daniel said. “I couldn’t find her.”

Fr. Burger nodded. “How hard did you try?”

“I called Siberia.”

“Why?”

“And?”

Father Burger waited.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“Well....” Daniel said. “A series of phone calls.”

Fr. Burger looked back to the television.

“This isn’t what trying is.”

Daniel nodded. “I don’t have a lot of experience with...trying.”

“Tell me Daniel,” said Fr. Burger, “if you heard this adage: ‘Miracles come behind the plow’?”

Daniel thought. “I haven’t.”

Fr. Burger stood to face Daniel, the old man straighter in form than he had seemed before, and suddenly right about Daniel’s height, six-one.

“It’s something the Baptists like to say,” said Fr. Burger. The old man’s eyes, bright green with flecks of steel, threw even light like a mirror.

“It is a little dry,” Daniel said.

Fr. Burger nodded.

“Nonetheless,” he said. “For a lazy philosophical type like yourself who puts all his effort into arguing his way out of having to really expend any, it’s germane. You don’t move a mountain by debating geography. You push it till it moves. You know you failed when you kill yourself trying.”

Daniel was looking at the television. He was blinking slowly, again and again, as though having entered a dream of an old memory. Fr. Burger turned to the screen. He turn the volume back up.

“—whom the press have dubbed “The Melancholy Don”.

“And who’s that beside the Don? It’s the Antichrist’s mysterious new Dark Lady, obviously a source of comfort to Satan’s apprentice in this difficult time. Can wedding bells be far away? We take you inside as—”

Daniel stepped past Fr. Burger and killed the sound again. He watched as the camera panned over Nadyenka Czillicz. She was tanner. She was better-dressed than he’d ever seen her. There was something else different that he couldn’t identify, like a single molecule out of place somewhere, inscrutable. She smiled with ceremony; she petted the Antichrist. She looked older.

“That her?” said Fr. Burger.

Daniel nodded. “Yes.”

Fr. Burger sighed, coughed a little.

“God jams in the twists and turns wherever He can fit them.”

Daniel nodded—

“Yes.”
Hitch MacAbee’s borrowed Chevy Nova crapped out on 93 right after entered the city. Now he was on a bus bound for West Vegas. Beelzebub’s funeral created traffic disasters everywhere. Drum circle conductors, and synth orchestras, herds of Druid-ish men and women were packed in erratic VW vans, hybrid automobiles, and those that ran on used corn oil. It all blended into a giant futile morass that knew no traffic barriers, the scene smelling of female body odor and old pop corn.

By the time MacAbee’s transit came within walking distance of the home of Dolly Huffman, his former future mother-in-law, it was late-afternoon. MacAbee walked with a numbness of purpose, of total exhaustion and moral singularity. As he marched down the subdivision sidewalk, wordless images spooled over MacAbee’s consciousness: Rita behind the Dillard’s counter before he even knew her name, Rita with her cross-stitching, Ubl Ac-Totl and his upbeat human sacrifice—Rita in jeans and a soft daywear camisole, Rita trying to take his life. Argentina. Hell. As MacAbee approached Mother Huffman’s home the images began to jump forward and tangle: Rita disemboweled, Rita in a barbeque pit. Mother Huffman a Haitian potentate bedecked in human fingerbones and teeth....

MacAbee noticed that his fiancée’s hatchback was not resting in the carport beside Dolly Huffman’s enormous and protruding RV, nor anywhere on the curb. As he climbed the front steps, the complex of emotional states necessary to spring loose déjà vu were sounded in MacAbee, and a partial reexperience of Rita’s attempted-murder stabbed through MacAbee’s brain. He took a deep breath, allowing the images to make their way through his mind and disperse. What they dragged along at the tail-end was a line from a Sunday school reading of unknowable pedigree—

MacAbee blinked.

He knocked.

The mountainous face of Dolly Huffman appeared after a long, challenging silence. Her green eyes went big.

“Hitch,” she said.

MacAbee wasn’t afraid. “Mom.”

Dolly’s eyes softened, the thick brows easing.

“It’s good to see you, Hitch,” said Mother Huffman, half a whisper.

MacAbee nodded. “Is Rita in?”

Dolly bit her lip. “I...” She coughed and stepped out onto the porch, shutting the door behind her. “I regret a lot of things, Hitch.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about, of course. But he wasn’t afraid.

“Me too, Mom.”

Dolly sighed. “I’ll tell you.” she said. “I consorted with a tea-reader once. And even though I knew it wasn’t going to make any real difference, it did make me feel better. It feels good to pretend you know what’s going to happen next....”

MacAbee’s eyes narrowed.

“Rita’s father was a Sufist, you may know that,” Dolly said. “He could put liquid steel in his mouth, 2500 degrees, and hold it there till it came out a cool slug. He had an afternoon show at the Mirage. But it was one thing we always fought about, that he would never tell me how the trick worked—”

Still MacAbee said nothing. He was wondering how they had reassumed an unuseful-mother-in-law-blather protocol, at a moment on which profound things hinged. But Dolly Huffman came to the point.

“I am aware that my daughter tried to murder you about two weeks ago,” she said.

MacAbee tried not to jump away from the old woman at this time, though he wished to. He stood his ground.

“Yes.”

MacAbee thought.

“In philosophy, or....”

“No,” Dolly said. “On Christmas Eve I went to a Voodoo priestess and we did incantations and doll-stabbings in your name. And apparently they worked. Rita never knew about it.”

MacAbee stood there a minute; he wished to fall over.

“Why?” he spat.

“Hitch, I hardly feel like I can apologize, because I don’t really know. One day you wake up and nothing makes sense, and everything you try to do to counter it makes it worse. That’s the only explanation I’ve got. It’s not an explanation, it’s just....”

“Life.” MacAbee said.

Dolly met his eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Life.”

But she was holding something back.

“Look,” MacAbee said, as toughly as he could, “whatever. Where’s Rita?”

Now Dolly wept.

“I don’t know.”
A half an hour later MacAbee was out in the dusk looking for Rita Huffman. First he went to the Dillard’s where she had worked since she was twenty-six. The mall was dark, the Dillard’s sentried by a mall guard named Odell Friedman. When MacAbee hissed to a stop in Dolly Huffman’s thirty-foot Class-C motorcoach, Odell was seated in a lone office chair that he had rolled out under the orange entryway lights. His uniform was nothing but an ill-fitting tan Oxford shirt and pleated blue slacks. He wielded a two-foot Maglite of chromium blue. As Odell approached him, MacAbee leaned out the driverside window awkwardly—twelve feet above the pavement.

Odell Friedman was depressed. He did not even perform his police-style preemptive blinding technique as he neared MacAbee. It will only do to explain that the world was ending: and Odell was never ever going to be a real policeman.

“How can I help you?” Odell said, peering at the pocked visage above him.

MacAbee was looking at the lightless Dillard’s, display windows dark.

“The mall is closed,” MacAbee said, breathless.

Odell turned around to look, to make sure he knew which one of them was crazy. He turned back.

“Yes sir,” said Odell, now performing his blinding technique out of cool spite.

MacAbee mashed a hand over his face, his eye muscles twisting on themselves painfully.

“My fiancé works there,” MacAbee pleaded, gesturing blindly.

“No sir she does not,” said Odell. “This complex has been vacant for thirty-two hours.”

“Why?” MacAbee said. He winked-out beings of pure light.

“When Satan got killed, sir, they figured there wasn’t much point left in merchandizing and et cetera.”

MacAbee nodded, still squinting. “Why are you here?”

Odell cleared his throat. MacAbee feared a second assault with the beam.

“I’m here to watch everything while nobody’s here, sir.”

“What could they possibly offer you to do that?”

Now Odell was definitely going to strafe MacAbee with the light again, but he realized there was compassion in the words, water-cooler empathy—a sort of show business commisery that permeates all Las Vegas tradesmen top to bottom.

“What I mean is,” MacAbee said, “when’s your next payday?”

“Oh.” Odell thought. “A week from Thursday.”

“Do you think there’s even going to be a week from Thursday?”

Odell coughed. “I don’t have any family I can get to,” he said. “Figure I’d keep doing what I was doing.”

MacAbee nodded.

“You wanna come with me?” he said.

Now Odell was looking back upon the sprawl of machinery that contained the odd little gentleman. MacAbee turned back to look with him.

“I have room for twenty-four.”
**

It was late. Odell Friedman had been employing investigative techniques gleaned from primetime dramas and countless ride-alongs with LVPD. Hitch MacAbee was still before the wheel of Dolly Huffman’s gigantic recreational vehicle, where they were parked outside Rita and MacAbee’s former home, the site of MacAbee’s near-stabbing. It was quiet.

“Let’s go over it one more time,” Odell said. “Tell me the last place you saw her.”

MacAbee sighed.

“There,” he said, pointing to the haunted edifice, yellow light mooning from the upper floors, haloing the lawn.

Odell nodded. “And that’s when she tried to stab you.”

“I’d rather not relive it.”

“And you have reason to believe she was not acting under her own volition.”

“Correct,” MacAbee said, refusing to delve into that painful fact either.

Odell nodded again. “Ok,” he said. The answer was beneath his fingertips. He could sense it at one remove of comprehension, as though in an unknown cuneiform. “Well,” he said. “Where was the last place you saw her before she tried to stab you.”

Hitch MacAbee thought.

“I’m...I’m not sure,” he said. “I think we spent that afternoon together.”

Odell raised his head. There was the scent.

“Okay, then,” said Odell. “Where did you go?”

MacAbee strained backward through his memory of the preceding days. The balmy afternoon of Christmas Eve seemed eons past: a lifetime of images and feelings packed into the week that partitioned him from it. He recalled the words of Kin Yama, his Zen confessor in the immaculate dungeons of the Abnormal Vigilance—

“Refusal is not an answer—” the glowing beatified sadist growled. “Answer or be destroyed.”

Hitch saw the raised fingertip of Kin Yama before his mind: blocking a whole universe of options, leaving only: One.

“Little Church of the West,” MacAbee said.

Odell looked up. “What?”

“Little Church of the West. That’s where we were on Christmas Eve. Rita was showing it to me, I remember. She kept telling me how Betty Grable and Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elvis all got married there.”

“Elvis pretended to get married there,” said Odell Friedman.

“Right, with Ann-Margaret. I already knew everything she was telling me.”

Odell smiled. “She was dropping a hint.”

MacAbee remembered the oncoming knife, the scream, the blackest black-hole emptiness of that image. He nodded.

“Apparently.”

“Well...” said Odell, “Viva Las Vegas.”

MacAbee sighed as the mobilehome banged awake, and they swiveled southeast on Radford, the big van rattling like a dumpster.
The Little Church of the West was framed by storefronts. On the left was Johnny Surplus, a pawn/closeout shop of irregular camping gear, pawned weapons, pawned guitars, a couple tournament-class all-terrain bikes—case upon case of liquidated wedding rings. On the right side of the Little Church was a place called Accouterments, which from the street appeared vacant, though up-close you saw ballistic white light squeezing out the edges of thick black tint film. Accouterments sold disposable lingerie, massage gloves, industrial gels and other accouterments including DVDs and nitrous oxide in a further, darker room.

MacAbee saw Rita’s blue hatchback on the street in front of the church. The motorhome rattled to inertia behind it. MacAbee looked to his counselor.

“So,” MacAbee said, peeling off his poncho, boggy and cumbersome with nervous sweat. He hurled it in back. “What do I say?”

Odell nodded.

“The first thing is: let her apologize. You never get in more trouble than when you don’t let a woman tell you she’s sorry. I assume she’ll want to apologize for trying to stab you.”

MacAbee nodded. “Maybe I should write this down.”

“That won’t work. It has to be natural,” Odell said.

“Ah.”

MacAbee shook his head, throwing off sweat.

“I never improvise on stage. I’m too unstable,” he said.

Odell smiled. “Become more stable.”

MacAbee nodded.

“Thanks for coming with me, Odell,” MacAbee said.

Odell winked. “Let her apologize. Let her do whatever she wants except run off.”

MacAbee nodded and got out. The big, wobbly door banged shut.

Odell sighed. He put his feet up. After a moment he fanned out wallet photos.
**

The Little Church was moody on the inside, false candles with orange bulbs in the windows and white Christmas lights smattering the walls and mood-lighting tracks hidden in a long recess against the ceiling. Rita was in the front row, facing a low corner-shrine. He recognized her hair and her slender, freckle-smattered shoulders. He recognized her spaghetti straps. The “Wedding March” banged in MacAbee’s head as he proceeded meekly down the aisle, organ strikes jarring him like cannonfire.

He got a view of the low, multicultural shrine: a Celtic cross, a bronze Shiva, a plaster Bodhisattva with its winking half-smile. A beam from above the door of the original Little Church presided above the objects, a prayer shawl draped on one end. In sunken red script the beam avowed:
I WILL NOT LET YOU GO TILL YOU BLESS ME
The horrible noise had left MacAbee’s ears. He blinked. He was ready. Rita looked sick. She was still. MacAbee was at the aisle-end of her pew.

“Rita.”

“Hey,” she said, husky, her voice cracking falsetto, and started crying again.

MacAbee waited again before sidling toward Rita. He sat. Her proximity was warm. It smelled good. It made MacAbee want to sing “Unchained Melody.” He coughed quietly. The small modular room was echoless, like a trailer.

“How long have you been here?” MacAbee said.

“All night,” said Rita.

She caught her breath. MacAbee looked around.

“I didn’t know it was an open-use chapel.”

Rita nodded. She let a stuffed-sounding sigh.

“It’s for tax purposes,” she said. “All the money changes hands in back on a different lot, technically under a different name.”

“What name?”

“I don’t know,” Rita said. “Marquee Entertainment or something.”

MacAbee couldn’t stand being close to Rita without touching her. He tingled along his scalp and in over his cheeks. His back sweat.

“I missed you,” he said.

Rita began crying again. MacAbee withdrew, scolding himself.

“Sorry,” he said.

Rita’s cry rose here, merging with a scream.

“Please—” she said. “Do not tell me you’re sorry. I can’t handle it.”

MacAbee swallowed. He stayed quiet.

“I tried to kill myself,” Rita said. “That’s when Mama came clean.”

She looked at him—eyes glossy abysms.

“I don’t remember Christmas Eve at all,” she said. “But the day you called and talked to her I had another episode.”

The queasy frustration of the “No English” exchange roughly a week earlier was recalled to Hitch MacAbee. It seemed another Hitch MacAbee who experienced it, though, as though on the far side of amnesia.

“Except this time I stayed conscious,” Rita continued. “I was weeding in Mama’s garden when the gasman came around the side of the house, and I attacked him with a push hoe.”

MacAbee bit into his tongue.

“...He got me down,” Rita said, “and took the hoe away from me. Mama told him I was bi-polar, and when he was about to let me go I started trying to slash my face, but he wouldn’t let me.”

The story was penance. MacAbee had determined to speak minimally and only by way of segue assistance. He let go of his tongue.

“Sounds like a good guy.”

“He was a good guy,” Rita said. “I was fortunate.”

They sat again in a stillness mediated only by the hum of air conditioning and the hardly-present burble of smooth jazz.

“Last night I woke up and I was sitting out on the driveway. I was covered in gasoline. When I looked over and saw the gas can and a big box of kitchen matches, and I realized what was happening. So I sat there for a second. My whole insides hurt, like I was dying. My head felt like I had a concussion. And I wasn’t thinking properly, but I picked up the matches and pulled one out, and just then the porch-light popped on. Mama came up and swatted the matches out of my hand. She carried me into the backyard and cleaned me off and then put me in bed. I woke up at 3:30 this afternoon and there was a psychiatrist from Mountain View standing over me.”

Rita sighed, sucking back air and spit.

“The children’s hospital?” MacAbee said.

Rita nodded. “He was a friend of the voodoo woman. She recommended him when Mama called to complain.”

“Hmm.”

“After a minute I got up, went into the bathroom, crawled out the bathroom window, and drove here. This is the only place I’ve felt even a little like myself in a week.”

MacAbee nodded. He worshipped her candor. He imprisoned the urge to touch her.

“I’m sorry, Hitch,” she said. “And I know it’s too big a thing to say you’re sorry for. Like how could you forgive me and still take yourself seriously.”

MacAbee nodded. Here’s the corollary of “Let her apologize”: Don’t forgive her before it seems plausible.

“Right,” he said again. He paused. “I’m going to say something now.”

Rita didn’t look at him. She sighed.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” MacAbee said. “For as long as I can remember I’ve been convinced that I’m nuts.”

Rita frowned, still not looking over.

“Or at least it’s always been a possibility,” MacAbee said. “Something I have to pay very close attention to.”

Rita nodded. “Okay.”

“Originally I asked you to marry me because I’m in love with you and I’m pathetic without you and everything else you know. Then I backed off because...Well, because I’m crazy, and...”

Here again MacAbee saw the smiling malice of Kin Yama: the placid sadism of the problematic.

“...And I have trouble making decisions,” he said.

Rita smiled, sniffed. “Right.”

“But I realized something,” he said.

Rita didn’t look up. MacAbee was bolder now.

“Rita—” MacAbee pulled her face around to his.

Her eyelashes were wet. They batted.

“Yes,” she said.

“I realized,” MacAbee said, “that the world is ending in order to tell me something—personally.”

Dewy lashes linked and unlinked.

“What?” she said.

MacAbee pointed to his honorary hat—its tall letters ALL-CAP in bright-hot gold, like suns.

“This,” said MacAbee.

Rita stared at the words. She held the light like a movie star. Mercy broke over her and she cried again, softer, breathier, forgiving and forgiven sobs. They kissed like mythical creatures. She heard his proposal. She affirmed everything he confessed. She knew everything he was.

She said:

“Yes.”
They’d gotten Odell. They’d deputized him.

“I’m not wearing that,” Odell said, when MacAbee offered him the SECRET AGENT ball cap.

MacAbee was tingling with moment. He gripped the silver ring he’d just gotten from Johnny Surplus, fourteen round diamonds of different diameters, the settings interposed around the band. It was hot as a branding iron against his palm. MacAbee built a quick argument.

“Odell,” MacAbee said. “It’s the End of the World. Law and Order as previously understood are in shambles, they are near-meaningless, their expiration date is up. There is only one pertinent brand of law enforcement right now, and it doesn’t have anything to do with justice. It has to do with this.”

He re-proffered the ball cap. Odell did not take it, but MacAbee left it extended.

“If the Abnormal Vigilance had an academy, what you did for me tonight would do perfectly well for a final exam or capstone. No one can argue that you do not deserve the hat.”

“Fine,” Odell said. “Just because you make me an Abnormal Vigilance deputy doesn’t mean I can marry you.”

MacAbee shook his head, unthrown.

“Yes it does,” he said. “Refer to what I said before: Emotional and intellectual assistance of those afflicted by the Endtime is all the Abnormal Vigilance does. And since that is all the relevant law and order that exists right now, being an Abnormal Vigilance deputy is being a Justice of the Peace.”

Odell thought. “Oh,” he said. He frowned.

“I mean,” said MacAbee. “That’s one argument. I can make up another one if you want.”

Odell looked over. He shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “That’s fine.”

He took the hat. In a moment they stood just as Rita had always wished, under the quaint lighting of the little churc, on the end of the strip where Elvis and Ann-Margaret once bleated “Today, Tomorrow and Forever—”

“All right then,” said Odell. He pinched the brim of his new emblem “I do not like long weddings. And I am in charge.”

Rita and MacAbee smiled at each other, stupid with happiness.

“So I will ask this and we will be done,” Odell said. “Do you both know exactly what you’re getting into?”

Rita and MacAbee conferred a long time, wordless, eyes locked. Rita smiled. Tears rocketing. MacAbee winked.

“Not applicable.”
The President had joined a homegroup two days after his abdication.

On his way home from one of several debriefings with Satanist apparatchik Tim O’Brien, the President passed a billboard in East D.C. that stood above a squat, unadorned building. In white block letters on a black field the sign had read:

“Yes.”

Rico looked upon the President without surprise, as though in some small part the President’s appearance was predicted and ordained. This was the expression with which Rico faced every phenomenon within his notice.

The President’s face hurt, his back hurt. His mouth tasted bad. He raised aching eyelids.

“Something’s missing.” He coughed out the confession weakly.

Rico smiled.

“I understand,” said the bearded one.

The President coughed again. He felt like a beggar. He scratched his oily head.

“Can you help?”

Rico laughed.

“I know someone,” he said. “Come in.”

They went in and sat. The building was an old Jiffy Lube. The floor of the former vehicle bay was blanketed in red-brown carpet squares. It housed an electric piano, a tambourine, and a few interlocking chairs, as from a hotel conference room.

“There’s no ‘join’, Mr. President—” Rico was saying a moment later, laughing again as they sat in his small back office, sipping a weak generic Folgers. Rico laughed often. But there was something wonderful in the sound. It was intentionally uncomplex.

“We do cell ministry—” said Rico. “Is that something you’re familiar with?”

There was a strange poster over Rico’s desk that pictured two giant frog demons. They were armed to the teeth, battle axes and leather shields and all form of pseudo-medievalisms. It looked like an advertisement for a role-playing game or a cartoon.

“READY?” the signage queried. “It’s gonna get weird...”

The President nodded to Rico, sipping.

“No,” said the President. “But I can bring better coffee.”
That evening the President found himself in the inner city carving his way through a muddy flatbed of rotten potatoes. A curious thing about the rotten potato is that the bad portions can be removed and the remainder of the object remain edible, even as the necrotic refuse makes spectacular fertilizer. The amputated stuff went into thankful hands. The President was thrilled. With each potato that he gutted and dispersed, even more so with the pick-up game he had supervised that afternoon, he felt the collective shame and loathing of his Presidency take on a different character. Not that it went away, but that it was gradually being subsumed in a new perspective. The President still hadn’t mourned properly for Murray, his son. He did not believe he would ever know how. But now there was something to do with the rest of human history other than huddle in his office and wait for it to pass over him like a waking nightmare. He was grateful and he toiled, grinning.