Mr. Thomas refused to let the matter drop. “I think he made the sunset to walk off into.”
“So he wants to impress the girls on the roof. So what?”
“So I think after he’s walked off into the sunset, he’ll go right on walking all the way to the polar ice cap.”
Jesus went white. “You’re not serious.”
Under stress, Mr. Thomas’s accent had become extremely Welsh. “Of course I’m bloody serious, boyo. That’s why I’m looking so worried.”
Semple interrupted. “Would someone like to tell me what’s going on here? Why should he be walking off to the polar ice cap?”
“If he’s walking off to the polar ice cap, it means he’s going to go to sleep for a couple thousand years and we’re in a lot of trouble.”
“I didn’t even know there was a polar ice cap in the Afterlife.”
“If there isn’t, he’ll make one.”
“And we’re in serious trouble.”
Semple was perplexed. “I don’t understand. What’s the problem?”
“If he goes to sleep, we’re prisoners in here for the next two millennia or more. No light, no heat, no power, no TV. We’d go insane.”
Semple looked at Jesus and the goat as though they were total idiots. “But that’s crazy. With the three of us, we ought to be able to raise the kinetic energy to wind-walk out of here.”
Jesus and Mr. Thomas exchanged glances. “Will you tell her or shall I?”
“I tried to explain it to her earlier.”
“We can’t get out of here.”
“Why not?”
Jesus shifted uncomfortably on the couch and put the remote to one side. Gojiro was now jogging steadily across the landscape with an ominous sense of purpose. “It’s the bit between the tumor and the eye. Remember the way you came in?”
Semple nodded. “Of course I remember. It wasn’t that long ago, even though it might seem like it.”
“In order to make it through there, we have to put ourselves in animation mode.”
“Mr. Thomas already told me that.”
“Well, we can’t do it anymore. The equipment broke and we couldn’t fix it.”
Semple turned sternly to the goat. “I though you said he’d forgotten how to do it. You didn’t mention equipment.”
“I was giving you the simplified version.”
Jesus arched an eyebrow. “And probably trying to make me look bad at the same time. He does that, you know?”
“But it’s true that we can’t get out of here?”
“Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
Semple thought about this for a long while. “My sibling Aimee and her nuns may be able to get us out of this.”
Mr. Thomas treated her to a long and slightly suspicious sideways look. “They could?”
“I think so.”
“How?”
“Either of you know the gold telephone trick?”
Round and round and round we spun.
A gold telephone materialized out of nowhere on the balustrade of the terrace, right next to a dead cartoon bluebird. For fifteen seconds, it did absolutely nothing, and then, exactly on the sixteenth second, it rang. Aimee was so taken by surprise that she didn’t immediately answer it. No less than four of the double-time European-style rings went by before she finally picked it up and tentatively put it to her ear.
“Hello.”
All around her, Heaven had continued to deteriorate. The sky was now a perpetual slate gray. The once-lush lawns were sere, brown, and dead. The trees had lost nearly all of their leaves. The lake had turned oily and polluted and every day more dead fish floated amid the greasy green scum on its surface. Increasing numbers of cracks and structural faults had appeared in the once-pristine buildings and window glass constantly and mysteriously shattered. Strange and sinister Santa Ana–style winds came in from the mountains and whipped up vortices of garbage and dead leaves, and threatening black smoke rose from beyond the same mountains from invisible fires that never ceased burning. To add the final insult to this catalogue of environmental injuries, the young women who had once danced by the temple on the Maxfield Parrish headland now spent their time consuming a diet of vodka, recreational amphetamines, and quaaludes, and coupling in wanton lesbianism.
“Who is this? It’s a very bad connection.”
Aimee had dispatched squads of nuns to do something about these girls flaunting their depravity right under her nose, but the young women were clever. Whenever the nuns were spotted, they simply ran off into the hazy mid-distance over which Aimee now had little or no control, a less-than-stable area into which the nuns were loath to follow them. As soon as the nuns gave up the chase, the young women would reappear and, once again, start disporting themselves, large as life and twice as obscene. Since the establishment of her Heaven, Aimee had never ordered the crucifixion of a woman, but in the case of these dirty and insolent little bitch perverts she would have happily made a precedent-setting exception-had she been able to catch them. Unfortunately, they proved totally uncatchable.
“Semple? Is that you? You sound so far away.”
Her own physical condition was on an exact par with the state of affairs in Heaven. She was plagued with respiratory problems and stomach pains, and in the last few days, each time she brushed the golden tresses of which she had always been so inordinately proud, she found the bristles of the hairbrush filled with alarming quantities of dead hair.
“You’ll have to speak up. I’m having a lot of difficulty hearing you.”
Perhaps the worst of the slings and arrows to which she had become heir since Semple’s departure was the awareness that her nuns were moving ever closer to a state of mutiny. Even as she tried to make sense of the mysterious phone call, half a dozen of them stood in a watchful, conspiratorial group whispering among themselves, eavesdropping, their expressions not unlike those of a pack of carrion scavengers waiting for the prey to die. If it hadn’t been for her ability to keep conjuring Prozac, she would have given up and returned to the pods long since.
“What are you trying to tell me? You’re bringing someone to do what?”
The nuns were edging nearer. The arrival of the gold phone was an occurrence so out of the ordinary, they weren’t able to contain their red-nosed curiosity.
“You’re bringing Him? Are you serious? Him? I’m telling you, Semple, things are not good here. I don’t have the reserves or the energy to put up with any of your nonsense. If this is some joke, it’s in extremely poor taste and-”
Aimee was suddenly paying such undivided attention to what her sibling was saying at the other end of the crackling phone line that, for the first time in what seemed like an age, she had momentarily forgotten the decaying world around her, the resentful plotting nuns, and even her deteriorating health.
“Yes, yes, I realize you can’t say whether he’s authentic or not. Right at this moment, even a low-rent replica would help matters a great deal. Just as long as he has some kind of power. He’s been living where?”
Now Aimee really couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Just tell me this isn’t one of your elaborate hoaxes. Just please tell me that.”
She knew credulity might be the product of a truly desperate hope. She wanted to believe Semple so badly. “You want us to wind-walk you in?”
Maybe her sister really was on the level.
“Yes, yes, I think we can do that. In fact, I’m certain we can do that.”
What made her inclined to believe Semple was that she could already feel energy flowing into her. Even through the phone, even at an incredible distance, contact with Semple was reconstituting her strength. The possibility would very soon have to be faced that she and Semple might well be indivisible-that the bad fueled the good, that the light was only possible because of the darkness. Except that Semple sounded as though she were suffering no diminishment in her powers as a result of their separation. In fact, she sounded healthy and dangerously energetic.