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Noah’s Personal Rapture
By David Dumitru
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If God did not play dice with the Universe, He had a lot to answer for. Pure
rotten chance was the only reasonable explanation for the facts of Noah
Hutcheson’s life. That, or something had gone terribly awry in the planning of
the thing.
Noah got up from the colonial patchwork sofa in his Aunt Jo’s living room. It
was just coming up on ten and soon the dim blue light of the television would
start into its nightly firefly dance. The man on the
All-Prayer-All-The-Time-Channel would disappear, lost in the ether for just a
few seconds before coming back into the room as if nothing had happened; as if
the time of his non-existence would go unnoticed, excused, and maybe even
blessed. The string of tiny decorative lights illuminating the shrine in the
nook above the TV would blink on and off. The circuit would overload and reset
the lights to the default, “twinkle,” program. In the nook, the faces of
Noah’s parents would take on an undulating glow, grinning and popeyed in their
picture frames. The gold-leaf lettering on the certificates commemorating Noah's
parents' posthumous induction into the Second Church of the First Savior’s
Order of the Angels would sparkle. Needle-thin rays of shimmering light would
flutter, dancing about the room.
The overall effect would give Noah the creeps. His stomach would churn and the
hair on his arms would stand at attention. Noah’s parents had been
missionaries. They had disappeared two years ago in Indonesia while working to
baptize a reticent band of Dayak tribesmen who had rudely declined to forego the
quaint cultural pastime of hunting heads. This is how Noah had come to live with
his Aunt and her son at the end of a dirt road in a house with drab gray
asbestos siding on the outskirts of a town on the outskirts of a farming
community on the outskirts of some place that Noah hoped might have skirts, if
he could only get out there to the skirts.
Of course, life before Aunt Jo had not been everything a teenaged boy could ask
for. Noah’s parents had been devoted disciples. Noah himself had been at a
loss for tears when his parents had suddenly stopped writing.
The telepreacher wavered in and out of Noah's peripheral vision. Noah heard the
creak and scrape of footsteps on the roof and went on tiptoe down the hallway to
his room, trying not to scuff the linoleum tile any more than it had already
been scuffed by years of neglect compounded by a steady accretion of grime. From
behind the closed door on Noah’s right, he heard the whirring of fans and the
whistling hiss of his cousin Henry’s air conditioning system. Henry was
determined to live to be one-hundred and thirty years old—unless The Rapture
intervened. He had read something on the Good Works Internet News Service;
something about how baptized Eskimos lived very long lives, subsisting mostly on
raw fish and blubber and prayer. Henry had put two and two together. He kept the
temperature in his room below fifty degrees at all times, rarely came out, and
ate nothing but uncooked frozen fish and congealed bacon fat (the latter being
somewhat equivalent to whale blubber, according to Henry’s Internet research).
Henry was aiming for a state of near-suspended animation. Henry was twenty-two
years old. Henry was just
getting started.
In his own room, Noah took his laptop from its hiding place under the
floorboards beneath his bed. With Aunt Jo up on the roof messing with the
floodlights, Noah figured he had thirty minutes to surf the web without benefit
of her guidance. He and Henry were supposed to use the PC in the alcove off the
dining room only, and only when Aunt Jo was supervising. No trips to the
library, no access to PCs at the bible school. Aunt Jo did not trust so-called
“parental controls” to protect Henry and Noah from the tools of Satan
lurking out there in the gibbering electronic void.
Not one to be thwarted in his entrepreneurial ambitions, Noah had purchased the
laptop, slightly used, with some of the money he regularly skimmed from the
collection plate at church.
He sat at his desk, waiting. Soon his study lamp blinked twice and steadied
again. Aunt Jo had switched on her lightshow. The Landing Lights, Noah called
them, erected in case The Rapture came in the middle of the night and time was
short. According to the experts, the lights would help the Lord identify the
elite members of his flock quickly and from the air in case The End came when
the flock happened to be sleeping. With the lights now on, Aunt Jo would pray
for a while before coming down from the roof, whence Noah’s fairly regular,
clandestine interludes of Internet freedom. Out of an abundance of caution, Noah
counted to ten before powering up the laptop and going online.
He cruised porn sites for a few minutes, just long enough to see if there were
any new thumbnail shots he could capture and copy over to one of his own sites, megafreeporn.com,
which was neither mega nor free, and which brought in a few bucks a month on top
of the take from the church. As usual, there was little happening there, and
over the space of the next five minutes he dropped a thousand dollars playing
virtual craps on a gambling site. If indeed God did not play dice with Universe,
there was at least an upside; Noah did not have to play against Him.
Noah checked his email. This was a little more fun. His in-box was loaded with
query letters from aspiring Christian novelists. Noah called up his prefab
rejection letter and sent it blazing out over the Net:
Dear Writer,
We here at the Wings of Angels Agency have carefully reviewed your submission.
Our staff has determined that your novel is the work of a hack and that you are
most likely a serial abuser of small children. We will be reporting you to the
Department of Homeland Security forthwith.
Your Friend in the Lord,
G. Asendwind, Literary Agent
Noah checked his watch. He had about fifteen minutes. He logged on as webmaster
to “readyforglory.org” and began composing an editorial for the newsletter
of the web-based University of The One Faith, Inc. He was concerned about the
power-load Aunt Jo was using on her heavenly landing strip on the roof. She had
managed to snag a trio of bats last week.
Drawn by the bugs which were drawn to the
light, the bats, like Icarus, had flown just that much too close to the searing
heat of the two-kilowatt halogen lamps. Upon discovering the skeletons, Aunt Jo
had taken them for the remains of tiny Hell-angels. From this she had reasoned
that The Rapture was closer than she had thought. She kept the bones in the
freezer, awaiting further instructions from the University’s Department of
Angelology.
Noah began writing:
Expert scientists have discovered through painstaking research that
the two-thousand watt RaptureReady (TR) lighting kit may be underpowered by as
much as half, owing to increased light pollution in the “Midwest.” With this
in mind, we are issuing a recommendation that RaptureReady (TR) users upgrade
immediately to the
five-thousand watt kit now available on our website.
Yours truly,
Wates Longely, Managing Editor
Noah uploaded the editorial. Aunt Jo would read it in the morning when she
checked the responses to her latest round of queries to literary agents
concerning her life’s opus, a Christian/Romance novel entitled “Jesus Came
for Me.” She would place an order for the new halogen lamps just as soon as
she stopped crying over the rejection letter. With the new lights it was a good
bet that she would bag an owl in the weeks to come.
With five minutes left, Noah clicked over to one last site, longlifesecrets.edu,
which happened to be associated with the same university as the rapture-light
scientists. He inserted a new link at the top of the home page and pasted in a
jpeg photo of a ten thousand BTU portable air conditioning unit. He tapped away
at his keyboard:
ICEQUEEN AC announces annual KEEPITCOOL Sweepstakes! Click on the
sponsor link for details!
Noah sent the page by wireless connection to the laser printer he kept in the
crawlspace beneath the house. He would slip the printout under Henry’s door in
the morning. Henry would zip himself into the down sleeping bag he kept on ice
in his room—if it kept out the cold, Henry reasoned, it must also keep out the
warm. Henry would beg Aunt Jo to grant him access to the PC in the alcove. His
eternally blue lips would pucker with anticipation as he squirmed, impatient,
cocooned in his sleeping bag. Having sealed his arms inside the bag, he would
plead with her to do the typing and the clicking for him. In order to enter the
sweepstakes they would have to answer a never-ending, looping, questionnaire.
Henry would begin to whine and then break down completely, finally abandoning
the project and hopping back down the hallway to his room where he could keep
the ambient temperature of the world at bay. Noah would get it all on tape for a
web-based, pay-per-view, reality-show he had been mulling over of late.
Noah looked at his watch again. He heard the rattle of an aluminum ladder, and
knew Aunt Joe was coming down from the roof. He stowed the laptop, put on the
Jesus Head pajamas Aunt Jo had given him for Christmas, and slipped into bed.
The dreams that Noah dreamt would have been nothing special for a fifteen
year-old boy had that boy not been Noah. There was a girl at the bible school he
attended who was endowed with a particularly fetching smile. That her sweaters
stretched to near bursting in the right places was a bonus, but one that did not
drive the primary engine of Noah’s desire. Her name was Nancy. For the
daughter of a fundamentalist nut, she seemed almost normal. It was this last
quality that most attracted Noah and most informed his dreams of their eventual
coupling. They would send their offspring to public schools, let them read Harry
Potter and Stephen King. There would be birthday parties at Chucky Cheese’s
and they would invite Democrats and maybe even immigrants with thick foreign
accents to dinner. Noah would graduate with an MBA from a respected university
in a big city. Nancy would receive a PHD in Veterinary Forensic Pathology, as
was her ambition. They would travel extensively, and as a family they would cope
with daycare and mixed-race dating and sex education. It would, in other words,
be an existence on the level of something approaching bliss.
But there in the background of his dreams, Noah’s reality gnawed away at his
simple ambitions. On this night, he saw his parents’ heads staring down at him
from atop Dayak totem poles in the middle of a jungle swimming in lurid tropical
steam. The hideous death grins on their faces curled up into perfect ‘O’s
and set loose a single wavering scream that pierced Noah’s ears, ripping
through his brain, casting every other thought aside. Nancy went spinning wildly
into a gaping abyss ringed with clutching, disembodied talons.
Noah fought to bring himself out of the dream, his vision blurred, his eyelids
slick with tears. He wrenched himself up in bed. Soaked through with sweat, the
Jesus Head pajamas clung to his flesh like a snakeskin. Noah was coming into
full wakefulness, he knew, but the screaming would not stop.
It was Aunt Jo. She was running back and forth through the house, howling and
bellowing, raising the alarm. The Rapture had finally come…again. Noah swung
his feet to the floor and sat, elbows on knees, forehead planted in the heels of
his hands.
The Rapture came once a month in the middle of the night. Rapture drills.
Noah sat waiting for Aunt Jo to start banging
on his door.
The door flew open and Aunt Jo stood there bug-eyed, jabbering for him to get a
move on. Noah struggled to his feet and pulled his robe on over the pajamas.
She shrieked at him, “This is not a drill!”
That’s what she said every month. Noah slipped his feet into his sneakers and
staggered sleepily down the hallway and out into the front yard. Henry was
already outside, standing in the grass like a popsicle in a bulging wrapper, the
sleeping bag zipped from the inside and pulled tight to his chin so as to create
the maximum seal. Aunt Jo started up the ladder, muttering something about
Noah’s chances for immaculate redemption.
“I’ll try and put in a good word for you, but don’t you hold out too much
hope, Noah.”
Noah watched her scramble onto the roof where eleven pure white beams—one for
each apostle, minus Judas, thrust trillions of photons up and out into space in
an eternal speed-of-light race to nowhere.
Aunt Jo called down from the roof, demanding that Noah help Henry up the ladder.
“Just tell him to take off the bag,” Noah replied, “He can climb the
ladder by himself.”
Aunt Jo’s face was black against the glare of the spots behind and above her.
Her hair, done up in fluffy twin buns that reminded Noah of a pair of molting
rabbits, cast a platinum aura a good foot above her head, like a halo under
attack by a swarm of tiny silver bees. “Noah!” she yelled. “Help him! Now!
Or I’ll make sure you’re left behind, mark my words!”
Noah shrugged. “OK,” he said. He rolled his eyes so far up into his head
that it hurt, then took a hesitant step in Henry’s direction.
Henry shot Noah a deadly scowl. “Get away from me, creep.”
Noah obeyed. He stepped back and watched Henry wriggle and hop his way over to
the ladder. Using his shoulder and the protruding knobs of his elbows for
purchase, Henry managed to get himself onto the first rung. Like some great,
demented caterpillar having just realized he was late for chrysalis-spinning
season, he climbed this way until his chin was level with the rain gutters.
It was then, watching Henry’s tortured ascent, that Noah saw something moving
in the sky. He could see lights, lights apart from Aunt Jo’s RaptureReady
lights. The new lights swept back and forth through the ink of the night, and
they were coming closer. Three of them. Now four, now five. This was no drill.
Noah’s throat dropped into his chest and his heart pulsed upward to fill the
gap. He heard himself whispering, “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” Then, much
louder, “Oh, fucking Jesus Christ!”
Aunt Jo was busy yanking and pulling and wresting Henry onto the roof while Noah
stood transfixed by the approaching lights. She was panting, out of breath. Her
breast heaved and she shouted at the sky, “That was the boy talkin’, Lord,
not me!”
Noah didn’t care. He turned on his heels and sprinted across the yard to the
dirt road out front. He turned left and leaned into the cadence of his stride,
making for the woods. He looked back over his shoulder to see the lights getting
closer. In his mind he could hear the thump of rotor blades. Choppers, it had to
be. The feds. They must have cracked one of his websites. It would be the end of
everything. There would be no Nancy, no dinner parties, no MBA, no kids to raise
as just plain normal human beings.
He cut from the road into a field, his chest pounding, a dull ache growing to a
screaming pain in his side. Maybe fifty yards ahead he could see the outline of
a clump of trees. If he made it he could take cover, rest for a minute, catch
his breath and think. He needed to think. His feet padded heavy against the
ground and he knew he was tiring. A few more seconds was all he needed. He came
up hard and fast on a drainage ditch that ran parallel to the tree line. It was
too wide. He would fall into the slime and the mud and get stuck. He would be
caught.
He did not stop. He did not hesitate. When he hit the very edge of the ditch he
went low, flexing his knees, rolling forward on the balls of his feet. He
punched at the air with both arms, grasping at the night for momentum. He felt
himself arcing through the air. He braced for the impact, the splash and the
suck and the stink. He closed his eyes, and the world went away.
It was taking forever to come to ground. There was a low, rumbling sound, like
an earthquake in his head, pounding and thundering. Someone was calling his
name.
“Nooooaaahhh! Stoooppp rrruuunning!”
He opened his eyes, expecting to see the water rushing up at him and the glare
of the spotlights from the choppers. What he saw instead was a very large man,
at least twenty feet tall, sitting in a huge marble chair. A throne. Smaller
figures in white robes milled around at the foot of the throne, humming to
themselves and occasionally taking flight, zipping around in a loop or a barrel
roll and landing on their feet. It looked like fun.
“God?” Noah asked, confused. His thoughts raced to the welcome conclusion
that he was still dreaming, that the drill had never happened.
“Yes, Noah,” God said. “And no, you’re awake.”
The voice was polite, almost jovial now, the thunderous booming having faded to
a more conversational tone.
“What’s happening?” Noah asked. “Am I dead?” He remembered from Bible
school that you’re not supposed to go staring at God if perchance you happen
to meet him. He looked down at his feet. The view was just like in one of Aunt
Jo’s crazy paintings of heaven. Noah was standing on the thinnest wisp of a
cloud. Beneath the cloud it was still night and he could make out the halogen
lights on the roof of his aunt’s house. He looked up and saw that the sky
above was a radiant kind of deep aquamarine, shot through with rainbows and
glittering dust that fell from no discernable source.
“You’re not dead,” God said.
“Can I look?” Noah said.
“All you like,” God replied.
Noah was a little surprised that he didn’t have to shield his eyes from the
light. He had a good, long look at God. Noah had expected something more like
that old gun nut who played God in the Moses movie Aunt Jo watched all the time.
Or maybe something like George Burns in the Oh God flicks. But the God Noah was looking at looked a lot more
like George Clooney in Oh Brother Where
Art Thou than George Burns.
God smiled. It was a friendly, laid back kind of smile. He shrugged and said,
“I could be Halle Berry if you prefer.”
“No, that’s OK,” Noah assured Him. He didn’t think it was a good idea to
be popping a stiffie in his PJs when talking to God.
Noah asked, “Why? Why me?” He pointed down between his feet at Aunt Jo’s
light show. “Why not her?”
“Because, Noah,” God said, “In all of your misguided scheming and all of
your misery in that household, you never once denied me. You asked if I played
dice with the Universe. You used my name, fraudulently, I might add, to get one
up on your aunt and her son and a few others, but you never once denied me. And
you didn’t let anyone do your thinking for you. You let me be me, whoever I
turned out to be. I like that.”
God’s right hand was cupped, the enormous palm up. Noah cocked his head to the
side, staring at the gargantuan appendage, expecting the click and clack of a
couple of dotted cubes.
“No,” God said. He opened his hand. It was empty. He shook his huge head.
“I do not play dice with the universe, Noah. I have Mr. Einstein to play
with.”
He laughed again and the whole place began to shake. It would have been
frightening, but the effect was muted by Noah’s own growing sense of
belonging.
Noah looked down at his feet once more. The cloud had dissipated and he was
standing in the clear nothing of the night air. Below him, Henry’s sleeping
bag had caught fire from the heat of the landing lights and Aunt Jo was rushing
to the edge of the roof and clamoring down the ladder.
“She’s going for the hose, to put him out,” God said.
“Christ,” said Noah. “With all the power running through those lights,
she’ll fry the both of them.” An image of the hapless demon-bats crossed his
mind.
“Yes,” said God, “She will. It will not be a pretty sight.”
Noah looked away. After an appropriate period of mourning, he said, “Speaking
of sites, you need someone to host your Web presence?”
God looked down from his throne, chuckling, His mammoth eyes aglow. “We’re
going to need a whole new infrastructure, my friend.”
“Armageddon?”
“You bet, Noah, now let’s us get to work.”
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There is little in life that tickles David’s
fancy more than to sit in His basement, writing about Himself in the third
person. He likes to capitalize the ‘H’ when He types He, His, Himself, etc,
as He is entirely convinced of His own metaphysical ascendancy. He lived for
five years in Australia, a notoriously atheistic society, and found it somewhat
wanting, as they lacked any real cultural experience regarding forms of worship
appropriate to His standing. He is currently working on a number of truly
amazing literary masterpieces.
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