When God doled out the punishment he really laid it on thick, but she believed.
Ruth believed because of the absoluteness of the fate of mankind. The scientists had their theories, back in the first few weeks, before the television and the radio were kaput, but the theories didn’t hold much water. Biotoxins. Germ warfare. Terrorism. Advanced mutated Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Anthropoid spongiform encephalopathy.
No.
This was the work of a vengeful god. This was the work of a god who’d had enough, and who could blame Him? People had been doing terrible things ever since they arrived on the scene, but in just the span of her lifetime it went from not so good to bad to worse to unimaginable. Politicians got slimier and greedier and less trustworthy. Wars weren’t waged for noble causes, they were pecuniary agendas. The younger generations kept getting stupider and more selfish and less humane. Popular culture was all in the toilet. Bad language was rampant. Overt pornographic imagery had infiltrated regular television-Ruth didn’t know from cable firsthand, but from what she’d heard it had been the telecast version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Craziness.
Gone were any kind of values one could hold dear. The people of her generation were shunned by society. The only ones who cared at all about them were the politicians, and that was only because the older generation still got out and voted. So, politicians and the pharmaceutical companies. Everyone else just was biding their time waiting for all the seniors to drop dead and vacate apartments like this one. Geriatrics and gentrification didn’t often cozy up. But that was just a personal beef. Donald Trump and his ilk didn’t erect the real estate that mattered. The Tower of Babel had been built again, at least metaphorically, and this time God was playing for keeps.
God had had enough of his naughty children.
Death was near, Ruth felt. Abe would be in for a rude surprise when he found out his soul would continue to exist even after his mortal form didn’t. In the next world-Olam HaEmet: “the World of Truth”-he’d have to answer for all his bile when they played back his life for him. Abe wasn’t a bad person-mean, maybe, but not evil-but his lack of faith would surely not be looked on with favor. Gehenom awaited Abe. It wasn’t hell, and he could move on, but he’d have to do some serious soul-searching-literally-to purify his untidy soul.
The depiction of the afterlife wasn’t explicit in the Torah. That’s where the goyim had it made. It was so black and white. They got scary fire and brimstone if they were bad or the Pearly Gates and Paradise if they were good. The Torah was more enigmatic. As a good Jew you were supposed to focus on your role in this, the material world. An eternal reward was a vague but effective motivator to stay on the correct path. All Ruth knew was that the soul went on for eternity and that was good enough for her. She just hoped that Abe would get his act together and make peace with God so they could link up in this nebulous afterlife.
And the children and grandkids.
And maybe Cary Grant.
Sure he was treyf, but oof.
Abe held the book close to the candle, straining to read the small print. Though he enjoyed Dick kicking the crap out of his poor deluded bozos in their subterranean Martian hovels, drugged to the gills with their little Perky Pat doll setups, the pain in his eyeballs negated the pleasure. Besides, he was actually envious of these fictional characters. Sure they’d been forcibly evicted to live on Mars-which was a complete crudhole-but at least they could get bombed out of their gourds and have these collective fantasy trips courtesy of some kooky hallucinogenic drug called Can-D. Or was it Chew-Z? It was both. Whatever. It was a crazy book, but Abe found himself embroiled in its labyrinthine plot. Dick was a nut, but an imaginative nut.
He put the book down and closed his eyes and rubbed them-hard. With spots and tiny patterns of organic hieroglyphs swimming on his orbits, Abe sat back in the chair by the window and enjoyed the fireworks. Abe rubbed some more, even though it was supposedly bad for you. When he pulled his hands away and opened his eyes again, flashes of light joined the spots and indecipherable microscopic pictographs. A distant clap of thunder echoed throughout the dead city, followed by a chorus of idiot groans from the undead. Abe blinked and pretended he was crocked on Dick’s wonderdrugs.
“I’m on Mars,” he whispered. “I’m in my hovel. Where’s my dolly?”
As the spots and runes melted away Abe realized the light wasn’t self-induced. Lightning? No, this flash of light cut right across his ceiling. From below. What the hell? Abe manually uncrossed his sleeping legs, flung himself out of his chair and hobbled on limbs of pins and needles toward the window. Just as he hung his head out a swath of light was cutting across the tops of all the cabbage-heads, forging south-a flashlight beam!
“Jesus H. Christ! Jesus H. Christ!” Abe gasped. He ducked his head back in and shouted, “Ruth! Hey! Ruth!” Another small thunderclap swallowed his thin voice. “God damn it! Ruuuuuth!”
“What? What is it already?” Ruth screeched from the bedroom. “You’ll wake everyone!”
“Good! Come in here! Quick!”
“What is it?”
“Come in here!”
Abe was trembling all over. He leaned back out the window and shouted at the departing beam of light. As it receded down York the horde seemed to spread out before it, creating a path.
“Hey, wait!” he shouted, his frail voice swallowed by another burst of thunder. In his ferment he launched into a convulsive coughing fit, his watery eyes following the light until it disappeared from sight. Now his coughing tears mixed with tears of despair.
“What’s the commotion?” Ruth whined. Though she was shrouded in darkness Abe could picture her bitter, disbelieving face. “What’re you dragging me out of bed for?” Her mental image of Cary Grant faded into nothingness.
“There was a light out there!” Abe said, gesturing at the street below, wiping his eyes.
“A light.”
“A light, for Christ’s sake. A light! A light!”
“Abe, it’s thundering out there. Ever hear of a little thing called lightning?”
“It wasn’t lightning. It came from down there! Down there! Not up there! Down!”
Ruth sighed the sigh of a long-suffering martyr and waddled back to the bedroom, leaving Abe wondering if he’d dreamt the whole episode, his mind suggestible to the transcendental literary powers of Can-D.
Or Chew-Z.
13
“They’re beautiful in a hideous kind of way,” Ellen said, admiring Alan’s studies of the undead. A week had passed since their coupling and Alan had invited her to his studio to see his work. No one else in the building had been permitted into his sanctum sanctorum. “My God, there are so many of them.”
“And no two alike,” Alan said. “Just like snowflakes.”
“Not quite,” Ellen frowned.
“Fingerprints?”
“That’s a bit closer. It’s like you’re cataloguing them.”
“I guess I am. Passes the time. Cave paintings of the future.”
Ellen’s eyes roved over the dizzying cavalcade of renderings. Beyond their technical excellence, Alan had captured something she hadn’t stopped to consider about the things outside: their innate humanness. Those things weren’t always things. They had been Homo sapiens. Alan’s meticulous artwork, while unsentimental, betrayed an element of latent humanity in the subject matter. The tilt of a head, the softness of a brow, the turn of a mouth, all reminded her that these empty vessels once had inner lives. They’d been friends and neighbors.