Kingdom come

The part of MacAbee’s mind in charge of internal maintenance skirred and stumbled over wheel-ruts of dura mater, looking for a dataset to paste onto this image. He came up with nothing. The woman was now writing on her clipboard, little words near the top of the page, it seemed, as though filling out standard fields—name, date and so on. MacAbee wheeled and stumbled over the provisos and codicils and requisites and bailout clauses of his consciousness: the rules of order.

His head hurt.

“Hi, Hitch,” said the lady evenly, stewardess-like.

Hitch MacAbee flinched so hard his chair scooted.

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

The lady before MacAbee righted her glasses, setting her clipboard on the table. She smiled.

“My name is Veronica, Hitch.”

MacAbee nodded. “My name is Hitch MacAbee.”

Veronica referred to her clipboard. “You’re here, Hitch, because you are suspected of having psychological strife out of the norm.”

“I see,” said MacAbee.

MacAbee thought. The meeting was already taking on an unspoken gravity that MacAbee knew he would not be able to countermand. He nodded.

“That’s fair.”

Veronica looked up from her clipboard and smiled. She leaned back in her chair again. “So you have interacted with the so-called “strangeness?”

MacAbee nodded again.

“I would say: yes,” he said.

“Good,” Veronica said. “Now there’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes, but the federal government needs me to make sure you’re not a danger to anyone. Particularly to yourself.”

MacAbee nodded.

“That’s fair,” he said, the words sounding eerily familiar.

“Okay,” said Veronica. She took a deep breath. “This will be easy if you just do your best.”

MacAbee winced. Warning bells crescendoing.

“Mm hm—”

“What is this object called, Hitch?”

MacAbee looked at the dictionary. He squinted. He felt a sudden, hollering terror at the idea of giving the wrong answer. He gripped his seat.

“That’s....That’s a dictionary?”

“Alright,” Veronica said. “Good. I’m not looking for right answers or wrong answers. I’m just going to grant whatever answer you give and do a follow up question to clarify, alright?”

MacAbee felt powerfully, almost painfully, that it was not alright.

He nodded. “Sure.”

“Okay, then. How do you know this is a dictionary?”

“Well....” MacAbee thought, again horrified by the possibility of misspeaking: “I guess I don’t exactly know. But it does say “dictionary” on the front.”

Veronica nodded. “Fine. And why does its saying “dictionary” on the front make it a dictionary?”

“It doesn’t,” MacAbee said. “I’m sorry. I’m just saying, if I had to guess, I would guess that’s what it is. It has the correct size, the embedded thumb-tags along the side of the pages and so on...”

Veronica nodded. “These?”

“Yes.”

“Does a Bible sometimes have these thumb-tags?”

There was nothing aggressive in Veronica’s tone. Her tone was lowered, rather, as one carefully eliciting confession. She was attractive and young. It was awful.

“Is a phonebook often this size?”

“Yes,” said MacAbee.

Veronica nodded.

“So,” she said. “What is the very least you could say for sure about this object?”

“It’s a book,” MacAbee said.

Veronica nodded without affirmation or exception.

“And how do you know it’s a book?” she said.

MacAbee thought. He felt his confidence preparing to rise slightly. “Because I can see it?”

“What can you see?”

“...That it’s a book?”

Veronica nodded, making a checkmark on her clipboard and then setting it back down.

“Okay,” she said. “And why is your vision a good enough reason to believe something?”

MacAbee felt his hardly-born sense of assurance collapse, like a trodden bloom. His tone was precarious again.

“Because your senses are... how you know things?”

“Sure,” Veronica said. She checked another box. She righted her glasses again. “And how do you know that to be true?”

“That your senses are how you know things?”

“Yes. Through which of the five senses did you come to know that your senses are how you know things?”

MacAbee shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“So is it possible to know this is a book or a dictionary or that it even exists?”

MacAbee squinted. “It’s only logical that what my eyes tell me is worth believing.”

Veronica made another check on her rubric, and then became very still for a moment, putting careful, quiet emphasis on the next question.

“And why,” she said, “is logic a good enough reason for believing something?”

MacAbee only had to think about the question a second or two before he panicked.

“Because everybody believes in logic?”

“I don’t understand,” Veronica said. “Logic is how you know things for sure?”

MacAbee had no idea.

“Mm hmm,” he said.

“But the reason you know that to be true isn’t that it’s logical, but that it’s popular?”

“Logic...” MacAbee said. “No, no, you’re right. Logic is...Logic doesn’t have to be popular. Not everyone is logical.”

“Then how do you know logic is valid? Does logic have a logical basis?”

“Logic...” MacAbee frowned. “Logic, by definition, is how you’re sure of things.”

He liked this answer. Veronica also seemed to, which was alarming. She smiled, pushing the huge dictionary in front of MacAbee.

“Good,” said Veronica. She left it there, withdrawing. “Who says?”

MacAbee noticed that Veronica’s head had a viper-ish quality, all her features pulling down into a flat, square nose and a straight mouth. She was beautiful. MacAbee held a breath. He tried not to choke on some spittle.

“I do?” he said.

Veronica nodded, and suddenly everything lifted like they were done.

“That’s good, Hitch, thank you,” she said. “Thanks a lot. I think you’re going to be fine.”

MacAbee nodded, trying to take some encouragement from this weak encouragement.

“Thank you,” MacAbee said, though “When?” might have been a more honest riposte.

“Let me ask you this,” said Veronica. “And please be honest: Are you absolutely sure that you exist?”

MacAbee thought.

“Not really,” he said.

“Good.” Veronica stood, reaching in the front pocket of her jacket. She placed her card on the table. She place a lollypop beside that. “That’s very good, Hitch,” she said. “Good luck.”

This final encouragement, whatever it was supposed to mean to MacAbee, was undermined by the scare quotes Veronica applied to the word “luck.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks...”

Hitch was apparently not done at all. Only hereafter did he undergo the real main-event psychological calisthenics.

First he was stripped to socks and underwear. Then his stomach was pumped empty. Then two young suited women put new clothes on him, something like black prison drabs. They sat him back before the same aluminum table. In a moment a sort of elementary school Mathematics worksheet was set on the table before him, something for a very young age, probably kindergarten or before, and he was given a long time to look at it.

The page was simply drawn, the toner lines inelegant, suggesting its photocopy pedigree: a copy of a copy of untold copies of copies. The worksheet comprised a crude grid of two columns and four rows. Six of the eight fields therein contained a simple picture: a flag, a drum, a cloud, a star, a sun, and a rainbow. Two of the fields contained nothing at all. At the bottom of each square, beneath thing or instance of undifferentiated blankness, there was the following dyad:

Eventually a low, musical grating came from the visitor’s throat, as of a metal file honing a tuning fork. It was his voice. Long impeccable teeth flashed when he spoke.

“Have you finished?” he said.

MacAbee blinked. He looked down at the worksheet again.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t started.” Finding nothing reassuring on the page, he looked back up. “Who are you?”

“My name is Kin Yama,” said the lean gentleman. “I can help you finish.”

MacAbee nodded, dazed.

“Thank you—”

Kin Yama waited for a moment. MacAbee could not tell what for.

“Please,” said Kin Yama finally. “Begin.”

“I give up,” MacAbee wailed again, burying his face in his arms.

Kin Yama said nothing at first. And MacAbee didn’t want to look. He knew his instructor and scourge would be waiting with a practiced absence of reaction, the way he had waited all afternoon.

“No,” Kin Yama would say slowly. “Giving up is not the correct answer. Finish the task.”

The words raked over MacAbee’s consciousness like an alarm. He stood up. He sat back down. He hollered. He whispered plaints. Kin Yama unmoved, immobile, unmovable. MacAbee had completed exactly none of the worksheet. Even the answers he had proffered to fill the field had met with cool negation from Kin Yama.

““Hitch”,” Kin Yama explained, “names a palsy or a fastener. What is your name?”

And, further:

““MacAbee” is a word. And yet you are not a word. How can you reconcile the matter on this tiny line?”

And further:

“If “Hitch MacAbee” actually names something, what does it name? You will point to your head or your chest and say ‘There is Hitch MacAbee,’ but I did not ask you where he is. I asked you to what those words refer.”

Hitch MacAbee obviously did not know.

As to the math questions, MacAbee had given scores of explanations for why one or another answer should fulfill the first “How Many?” problem. It pictured a simple cartoon drum-set above the familiar options: MacAbee never got past it. The more desperate and enervated he became, the more technical concepts rushed out of him that he was not aware of having ever known.

First he argued for One: the abstract singularity clearly assumed by the test-maker; then the semantic unity enshrined in the phrase “drum-set”; then the unity implied by the boundaries, even around the blank problems: parametered, thus unified, instances of nothingness. So on.

As MacAbee’s emotional state began to shear, he started arguing for Zero: the conceptual hygiene of mathematics over and against the crude variety of objects, the practical inadequacy of the word “object,” the irreality of negatives, the pretense of infinity, etc. He dissected and defiled the current-traditional Philosophy of Mathematics without knowing very much about it. By the end, when he could make to pretense to following his own threads of reason, MacAbee started deconstructing the worksheet itself, calling its own episto-moral authority into question, the deceit of institutions, the myth of intellectual cooperation—on and on.

“That is not the answer,” said Kin Yama.

And MacAbee’s ragged, sobbing reprise: “Why not?”

And still Kin Yama howitzered repetitions upon MacAbee’s ill-fortified consciousness: “It is less than the answer you are withholding,” said Kin Yama. “How many drum sets exist? The possibilities are zero and one.”

Finally a new response emerged from MacAbee when they reached this point.

“I hate you,” he said. He took a deep, raging breath, rattling like his voice box had come dislodged. He pointed into the huge, false, impassive face. “You are everything that has ever gone wrong, ever not made sense, ever been impracticable.”

Kin Yama blinked.

“That’s true,” he said.

MacAbee didn’t hear him.

“I’m hungry,” he said, “and I’m cold, and I’m tired, and there is nothing on this worksheet worth answering.”

Kin Yama nodded.

“I understand,” he said. “It is your choice not to answer. Only recognize that if you do not answer, the question has proprietary control of your universe, and can annihilate you at whim.”

“Zero,” MacAbee was saying, throaty, deaf, “is just a very, very, very—” He coughed, mucussy. The “verys” sounded like pleas, which they were. “...Just a very complicated concept.”

“You and I are in agreement,” said Kin Yama. “So is One.”

MacAbee stared at the sheet still below him. It was boggy with tears.

“How could a child answer a question of this magnitude?” he said.

“The question is appropriate.”

MacAbee looked up slowly. This was the only encouragement Kin Yama offered thus far. It made MacAbee blush, tears heating up over his cheeks.

“Please consider it,” said Kin Yama, “as you go forward.”

Kin Yama made no move at first, the green eyes mining Hitch MacAbee’s consciousness still. Then finally Kin Yama stood and walked to a stainless steel dumbwaiter on the far wall. He opened it and removed a small wooden bowl, which was steaming. He came back and set it before Hitch. It was three inches of cloudy broth, two noodles, five green onion clippings lilting, and three cottony white croutons, soaked-through. Beside it the master lay a Japanese soup spoon of black ceramic. When MacAbee looked up from the bowl Kin Yama gave a very personable bow, his face drawing up with unexpected age as he smiled. Then he spoke, the same low voice, like rocks over harp strings.

“Once there was a master named Gutei,” he said, “who raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When a visitor asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy raised his finger.

“When Gutei heard about the boy’s mischief, he seized him and cut off his finger with a knife. As the boy screamed and ran out of the room, Gutei called to him. When the boy turned his head to Gutei, Gutei raised up his own finger.

In that instant the boy was enlightened.”

Silence returned. After a moment’s consideration MacAbee began to sense a kind of distant solace in the amputated logic of the account, for it rang quiet harmonies in his own biography. When he looked up for clarification, Kin Yama was holding up his left hand, forefinger raised.

MacAbee stopped. Momentarily he bowed.

“Thank you,” he said.

Kin Yama gave another slight smile. He indicated some stairs on the far end of the room.

“You will go now,” said Kin Yama. “And if you wish after six months you can return.”

MacAbee thought for a moment, nodding. He was looking into his fine, transparent soup. He looked up.

“But the world—”

MacAbee stopped, sighing as the finger withdrew once again.

MacAbee nodded. “You’re right.”

Kin Yama bowed again and departed, disappearing through the gray door he’d come in, his heavy hemp robe shishing on the cement. For a long time MacAbee sat, watching steam rise from the bowl, lessening gradually till gone. When he finally put the vessel to his lips the broth was lukewarm, but the salty meaty flavor revived him. MacAbee swallowed it all, and it gloved his molested stomach like medicine. In a moment he rose from the meal and took the bowl back to the dumbwaiter. Beside it there was a kind of laboratory sink with a long curved spout. MacAbee turned on the water and for a moment listened to the soft aerated stream ringing in the metal reservoir. He then went to work, gently washing his bowl, shaking it dry, and placing it before the dumbwaiter. When he came back to the table, MacAbee found his clothes had appeared, laundered and neatly folded, waiting on its half-counter. There was a cap sitting on top of the bundle. MacAbee inspected it.

The worksheet awaited consummation....

N/A.

Back below him in the examination room, Lucas d’Estime took his seat, waiting on his own screening. Lucas made himself comfortable in the hard aluminum chair, popping his knuckles and stretching, as for an arm-wrestle.

Nadyenka had given up. It was all she could do. Patience was not in her nature. She knew it. Ten hours had passed since her experiment in the occult. Dusk came and she had crumbled. She felt it happen. At 5:30 Nadyenka went and found a convenience store and procured a large can of malt liquor in a single-beer sack. She found a small metropolitan park: just a fountain, an odd piece of shiny municipal art, a jungle gym and a pair of benches on an awkward street corner. She sat. She sucked the flavorless cold stuff in foamy swallows. She tasted the can. After only a few ounces, the liquor was whomping against her brain—a numb, deaf feeling. She had been without hot toddy for a week, she realized, and her tolerance was dilapidated. She slid back on the bench, sick to death.

“No use,” she was saying, loud and throaty, as though singing or dying—picture of a street drunk: “No use at all.”

She stopped then, because there was a tall man standing in front of her with a large paper bag.

“What isn’t?” he said.

Nadyenka burped, swallowing bubbles back. She blushed and looked down. The man laughed.

“How did you know where to find me?” Nadyenka said.

The man reached down and touched her face, and she met his eyes. They were ice floes, perfectly and unassumingly clear. The effect upon Nadyenka’s brain was one particular to those being perused by the Antichrist. The eyes pulled on her insides.

“Who found who?” said the Antichrist as his long face drew up in a smile.

Nadyenka was weeping.

Lucas d’Estime underwent the same Intellectual Therapy session Hitch MacAbee had, except that Lucas’ d’Estime session concluded much more quickly, with Abnormal Vigilance Officer Derek Perico requesting to be put on Lucas’ mailing list. They’d been sitting in the cold, antiseptic room only a few minutes, with its sourceless metallic echoes and smell of brushed aluminum. The table had been cleared of the “How Many?” worksheet; it was still dotted with the dry-salt leavings of Hitch MacAbee’s tears.

“Anyway,” Derek was saying. “We really appreciate you coming.”

“Not a problem,” Lucas said.

“I’m gonna run this session myself so we can make sure and get you right out of here.”

“Thanks.”

Officer Derek was undergoing the sneaking dread one gets when being left alone with any psychologist, constantly having to speculate what their powers of analysis are extracting from you without your knowledge or consent. Of course, Lucas was not a psychologist; and anyway it was much worse.

“What we try to do here—” Derek said, coughing. “You may know more about this than I do, actually, but what we do here is to make sure people are thinking well. As life becomes more difficult and bizarre.”

“Noble,” Lucas said.

“Thank you.” Derek smiled.

“Noble as in futile,” Lucas said, scratching his cheek.

“Well,” Derek said. “Well, yes. No, I’m sure it’s—”

There was a moment here, Derek knew, in which he was hemming and hawing, making noises that were not real words, feeling his every attempt at a reply rudely shouted down, though Lucas d’Estime was obviously no longer speaking. So that when Lucas did speak again finally Derek was relieved he didn’t have to decide what he was going to say next.

“The world is about to end,” Lucas said. “If anything’s ever going to be certain, that’ll be it. If anybody is bothered by uncertainty, Officer Derek, go have them sit outside. The End of the World is God doing something that human beings can’t make less meaningful through argumentation. It’s Cosmic Ideological Therapy, the endgame dose.”

Derek had stopped trying to speak, and simply nodded now, sliding a heavy Webster’s Dictionary from the table and setting it on the floor beside his foot. He kicked it slightly.
“Please just call me Derek,” he said.

Lucas nodded. “Derek.”

“But, no,” Officer Derek said. “That makes sense. Is it from one of your books?”

Lucas shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Just something I’ve been thinking about the last couple days.”

“Well,” Derek said, “I think we’re saying basically the same things here.”

Derek had completely forgotten what he had said so far, if anything. Lucas smiled again. The smiles made Derek feel very good, and now he had to laugh at himself, like releasing a held breath.

“Alright, Mr. d’Estime,” he said, chuckling. “I don’t want to waste too much more of your time, but there is something I’m supposed to ask, here.”

Lucas nodded. “Proceed.”

“Well, it’s going to sound like a stupid question,” Derek said. “But, Lucas d’Estime, sir....Are you sure you exist?”

Lucas hardly considered it, merely nodding to himself as though affirming a ready conclusion. He looked up.

“That is a stupid question,” he said. “Yes.”

“Mmm,” Derek said, nodding and trying to appear scientific, noting the response with a single meaningless checkmark on the agency form. “Ah,” he said. “How, exactly?”

Again Lucas didn’t pause. “I have faith in my existence,” he said, “in the absence of proof of my existence.”

Derek blinked several times, his long, black, doll’s eyelashes batting together like hands.

“Wow. Ok,” he said, and began scrawling on his clipboard, a little breathless. He stopped again. “Really?”

“Yes,” said Lucas.

Lucas pointed to his own brain.

“Skepticism is like throwing a book at an earthquake.”

Officer Derek looked down shyly at the Webster’s Dictionary by his foot. He was blushing. He released a surprised, one-syllable laugh.

“Wow,” he said again. He looked up. “Jesus, wow. I gotta tell you, I feel a lot better...”

“Good.” Lucas nodded. “Now give me my wife and get me out of here.”

Officer Derek froze. “Where are you going?”

Lucas cleared his throat. “I was going to try and save the world,” he said. “I figure it’s worth a shot.”

Officer Derek nodded, moved. He touched the bruise on his throat.

“Of course.”

“I’d like some transportation,” Lucas said.

Officer Derek couldn’t name the feeling.

The Abnormal Vigilance fleet was an opera of bizarre shapes and colors: ice cream trucks and bread vans in garish Fauve; hearses and ambulances splayed up in the more incensed and impenetrable Matisse, Kandinsky, and Braque—births and deaths and violins, murders and ascensions, swaths of purple and red, gallons of gold—the more conspicuous and the less accessible, the more prevalent. There was an oversized-hotdog mobile, countless pink silicon dildos repining from its theatrical canopy like tassels. Out in the middle there protruded a single, saddled giraffe eating from a feed trough that had been lashed to a portable basketball goal. Lucas smiled over the bizarre nuances of the scene, as only a truly gratified art-lover during a truly pointless exhibition can do.

“—Lucas!” Derek was calling from below, high and panicked, as though begging an older sibling. They couldn’t see him. “Are you coming?”

Lucas turned to Jacqueline, smiling. “Shall we go?”

Jacqueline breathed.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” she said.

“What?”

“Saving the world,” she said. “You don’t owe it to anybody.”

“Jacqueline—“

“You don’t owe it to me,” Jacqueline clarified.

He kissed her forehead.

“Nothing to it.”

Lucas led his wife gingerly down the stairs and out onto the lot and in a moment they’d found Derek, who was beaming proudly next to the large ox cart in which Lucas had been apprehended. It looked smaller and less incongruous among the preponderance of movable absurdity that surrounded them. The oxcart’s cosmetic exterior had been specially constructed, Derek explained, with real turn-of-the-century hardware and authentic gopherwood.

“What do you think?” Derek begged.

Lucas studied the vehicle. “Why this one?”

“Well,” Derek said. “It’s brand new, and it’s fast and about as sturdy as a SWAT van, and I thought—”

“It’s perfect, Derek,” Jacqueline said. “Thank you.”

Lucas looked to his wife. He smiled.

“Thank you, Derek.”

Lucas held his wife. Felt the magic bean of Armageddon pressing out against his middle like a hand....

Derek beamed. For the moment he hopped around the vehicle, making small modifications and adding final things. In a moment he would request a hug for himself.

“You’re going to be a dad,” Jacqueline said.

“There is that....”

They were crying.

The koan is nothing but a targeted recapitulation of all human experience: Nonsense, distilled utterly, for the express purpose of demolishing human consciousness.

Lucas d’Estime

Dining Sister Turtle Universe
*

By the time a man approaches forty, he has by evolutionary standards overstayed his welcome and in biological terms outlived his purpose.

*
Dyna Mitchell looked up as her husband entered, relief melting over.

“I hoped it was you—”

The first thing Padraig noticed was how tidy Dyna had kept the interior of her module. In the milk crate beside her a number of empty purified water bottles and two soy protein-based smoothie bottles were carefully aligned. Alongside them zip-top snack bags, still mostly full, sealed tight. There was no smell at all and no refuse unaccounted for—Dyna’s brassy white hair was even done up, though distinctly lopsided.

For an instant, of course, Padraig felt like crying, and he thought he was. Then he realized he wasn’t crying—taking in big draughts of air and trembling them out—he was laughing. He fell to his knees, screeching as he inched across the small space, awkward and bulky, an elephant bumping through a low doorway.

“Dyna—” Padraig said as he neared. The tabletop bumped his chest as their faces came close. He kissed her. He touched her face. He couldn’t breathe: “Marry me.”

Dyna smiled. He kissed her more. She laughed.

“We’re already married,” she said.

Padraig paused. “I don’t want a bunch of practical concerns getting in the way,” he said, attacking Dyna’s long neck like a boy.

Dyna laughed, partly from the ticklishness of Padraig’s unshaven scraggle. But she did not ask and he did not desist.

“Fine—” she said with a scream. “Fine. We won’t.”
A half an hour later they sat back in their living room, Dyna on the red and black Zapotec rug in front of the couch, Padraig cross-legged on the ground before her, laying out tablecloths he had acquired for her choosing.

“This,” he said, draping over his arm a bolt of textured linen, mapping its ticking with his fingertip, “I got because it’s that peacock blue you wanted to paint the trim. I figure now we can go ahead and paint the trim and it’ll match. I know you’re supposed to base your painting decisions on a certain color or fabric in the house that you especially like.”

Dyna laughed. “Right.”

“This...” Padraig said, sliding from the bag a white lace doily with a five pointed leaves emanating from a delicately ruffled middle. “This I got because it reminded me of frilly underwear.

Dyna squealed. She slugged Padraig with her opposable arm. A kitchen stool braced her up. Padraig laughed and started sliding his merchandise back into the bags. But when he looked up again, Padraig saw that Jacqueline was no longer grinning.

“What?” Padraig said.

Dyna’s eyes were level now, her tone deliberate, as though eliciting very specific information from a child.

“So,” he said. “What did Artie tell you to do?”

Padraig started. He blinked. He hadn’t thought about Artie in more than two hours. The Jacquard lay over his arm, and a plastic sleeve of black furniture casters hung from his teeth. It was the first time in weeks he’d gone fifteen minutes without cursing Artie Gunn’s image.

“Oh, Artie,” Padraig said. “He told me not to do anything.”

A delicate pang cut Dyna’s face.

“Don’t do anything?”

“Yeah,” Padraig said, yanking an ottoman over and sitting beside Dyna. “He said: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Those are his exact words.”

Dyna cocked her head slightly in thought. She chewed a delicate apple-pink lip.

“As in,” she said: ‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll go away’?”

Padraig shook his head. “He didn’t specify.”

Dyna was quiet a moment. Her disappointment showed, the crow’s feet around her eyes and mouth flexing and unflexing as she gnawed her cheek.

“The thing is he’s right, Dyna—” Padraig said.

Dyna frowned at him, half-suspicious. He scooted forward.

“The world is ending,” he said. “The horseman, the rivers of blood, the frog demons. There are worse things than being turned into a coffeetable.”

Dyna said nothing.

“You know...” Padraig said. “I assume.”

“Huh,” Dyna said. “Like maybe we just see if it goes down.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Padraig said. “Look, sweetheart, we will do absolutely whatever you want. We’ll talk to faith-healers, we’ll join a church, we’ll find some other Magi—I don’t care. I’m just not leaving again.” Padraig smiled. “I see now that I was wrong,” he said. “And that originally I was correct.”

Dyna was quiet for awhile. Padraig respected the quiet, and hung his head slightly as in a moment of remembrance. He listened to the kitchen clock out of sight behind him, the twin dachshunds in the next yard savaging each other with foamy snarls; the furnace kicked on with a whoosh. He loved their home.

“You know what,” Dyna said quietly, clearing her throat. “You and I never got to celebrate Christmas.”

Padraig looked up. “That’s true.”

“And we never got to have Happy New Year sex.”

He nodded. “Also true.”

“Or even,” Dyna said, “end of trial-separation sex.”

Padraig shook his head. “Sad.”

Dyna was quiet again. Finally she smiled. “Would you like to play Legos for a bit?”

Padraig stared at her.

“Yes.”

Padraig kissed his wife. She laughed.

It was strange.

They were happy.

MacAbee didn’t know who the man could be cooking them for. MacAbee didn’t think about it. He ate. It was good. Tamales blanketed in steaming chili topped off with onions and cheese. It was good. MacAbee ate it. He burned his mouth. He sweated out smoke and chili fumes. He didn’t think. Not for a long time. He noticed when he was done eating. He tossed in a balled napkin. He blinked. He touched his hat.

RITA.

There was a picture stuck to this word.

HORSEMEN.

MacAbee noticed he was standing. That he had withdrawn a business card from the flap-pocket on the front of his poncho.

VERONICA REGINA APPLEBAUM—

Her title and phone number. He threw it in the garbage. He consumed the lollypop.

MacAbee noticed that he was stumbling toward a traffic light. A moment later he noticed that he was lifting someone out of a car, drawing a man’s sweaty, pleading face close to his. MacAbee had bizarre strength. His hands were numb with raw, willless force.

“I’m sorry,” he was saying.

MacAbee heard things. He entered the moment, with the sucking sound of a car exiting a tunnel at top speed.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I need your car.”

The man squirmed, making unintelligible plaints, kicking and pawing against MacAbee, staring up at the SECRET AGENT ball cap as though MacAbee lacked a head. Nothing felt like anything.

“What the fuck are you talking about—it’s mine.”

The gentleman wept. The End of the World is hard on people. Something clicked in MacAbee’s head, like a magnet actuating a circuit.

“Ownership,” MacAbee said, “is problematic in this case. You possess the car, but owning isn’t much more than a willingness to kill in order to defend your interpretation of “ownership.” Since I am willing to kill you in this case, you may either defend or relinquish your claim on the vehicle, and this decision on your part determines ownership, for it defines it. “Stealing” the car will not be necessary either way.”

MacAbee trembled. He heard a rattle.

He set the man down. For a moment the man was thinking, straightening his coat.

“You mean you just want me to give it to you,” the man said.

MacAbee nodded. “Please.”

The man said nothing.

“You can give me your number,” MacAbee said. “And I’ll bring the car back in a few days if you like.”

“The world won’t be here in a few days.”

MacAbee nodded again. “You see that contractual negotiations are problematic in this climate.”

The man blinked.

“Here,” MacAbee said, reaching into his pocket. “A deal.”

He placed the contents of his pocket in the man’s hand: seven matted bills and a wrapper-less dried pineapple wedge invaded by fuzz.

“It’s a lease,” MacAbee said. “Considering not how much I need this car, and how little time you have left enjoy it, but only how good the tamales are—” He directed the man’s attention with a trembling hand. “Which on the open market, on that very corner can be obtained for six dollars and fifty cents. Arguably this is a very good deal for both of us.”

“Arguably....”

“Yes,” MacAbee said. “We can argue it some more if you want.”

The man thought.

“No,” he said.

“Alright, then,” MacAbee said and entered the car.

He waved to the man.

“Would you actually have killed me?” the man said.

MacAbee thought.

“Questions that begin with “would” have other possible universes for their objects.”

“Probably not,” MacAbee said. “But the tamales really are something.”

“Good to know.”

“Tell him I sent you.”

Now the man simply stared at MacAbee.

“Good luck,” he said.

MacAbee coughed. He drove away. The possibility of working out the moral calculus of what he was doing occurred to him, but only for a moment, not long enough to bother him, before he threw it out. The stoplights all were blinking, red and up above him, like signal lamps on distressed, low-flying craft.

*
INS. – New York Post Headline – 01/03