“Oh, you’re talking about Heaven now? With the angels and the harps?”
“You make it sound stupid.”
“It is stupid, Terry. It’s stupid for stupid people.” When Terry paused, Nomad said, “Go on, let’s hear some more. Set it up so I can knock it down.”
But Terry stared at the floor and worked his hands together, and he didn’t answer as outside in the hallway there was the bing-bing of an intercom followed by a woman’s voice paging what sounded like ‘Dr. Pajiwong’.
At last Terry said, “It’s not as simple as you make it out to be. Or as simple-minded. See, you laugh and say it’s ‘bullshit’ because you’ve never heard a stranger speak your name in a church before. Nothing’s ever happened to you that shook your foundations, or made you think that you don’t know everything. I’m a human being, I can’t see through the dark glass. My personal belief is that there’s a Heaven and Hell of some kind, but—”
“Pitchforks and golden halos,” Nomad interrupted. “When I die I want to go south where the action is. I want a slut from Hell giving me an eternal—” Blow-job, he almost said, but he felt Ariel’s presence and he amended it to, “Lap dance.”
“Are you afraid,” Terry asked, as he lifted his gaze to Nomad’s, “to even let yourself wonder? Does that scare you so much?”
“No, it doesn’t scare me.” Nomad’s eyes narrowed. “I just don’t want to spend any time wondering about being nothing. Because that’s what you are after you die. Everything you were and thought, gone to nothing. Just like the dark blank before you were born. How come your stranger in the church didn’t help you out a little more with these kinds of questions, Terry? How come he like…hit and ran, without saying what everybody in that church really wanted to know. Huh? How come he just didn’t say, ‘I’m speaking with the voice of God, and I’m telling all of you there’s an eternity where everybody finds happiness…whatever that is’. How come he just picked out three or four people and left the others feeling like they were skinny kids in a schoolyard too nerdy to join the cool team?” He let that hang, and then he asked, “How come your stranger didn’t tell you why innocent children and good people like Mike get killed every day of every week, every month and every year? Now that would’ve been worth hearing. So if you’re saying it was the voice of God…he’s going to have to speak a whole hell of a lot louder before I’ll listen.”
Terry stared at him for a few seconds longer, with the reflection of Nomad’s face suspended on the lenses of his specs. Nomad stretched his legs out, leaned his head back and closed his eyes as an instruction for Terry to go find another place to sit. After a while Terry got up and pulled his chair over nearer Ariel, who gave him a faint smile and a nod but who saw that he’d been defeated in his purpose of making John Charles grasp the possibility of the Unknown Hand. That was how she’d always pictured God. An Unknown Hand, moving for the greater benefit of human beings. It seemed to her that when it could move it did, but there were times it could not, or for some unrevealed reason it did not.
John had asked some good questions, she thought as she watched him either feigning sleep or searching for it. Some questions that were asked by believers and non-believers alike. Believing didn’t mean the questions should be silenced, she thought.
She didn’t have the answers. No one on this side did, and if they pretended to they were probably lying to make money from frightened people, which made them deceivers that the Unknown Hand should have crushed…but it did not. Just as the Unknown Hand did not move to bring justice against the wicked, or stop evil, or eliminate suffering in an outpouring of miracles.
Because, she thought, that work depended upon known hands, the hands of men. Maybe the Unknown Hand moved things beyond the understanding of men, or set things into motion that asked men to make choices, and whatever choices men made they had to live with for better or worse. Maybe the Unknown Hand directed men, or prodded them, or presented them with problems to be solved and men were unaware of its presence in the chaotic life of day-to-day. But maybe the world belonged to men, it had been given to them as a gift, and whatever they did with that trust was their burden and responsibility, and the Unknown Hand—like the voice of a stranger in a church—could guide but not compel.
She didn’t have the answers. Like everyone else, all she could do was wonder.
Berke came back in with a can of Coke she’d gotten from the first-floor vending machines. “All done with the prayer meeting?” she asked, but no one bothered to reply. She sat down on the sofa and propped her feet up on the table that held a stack of months-old magazines. What she didn’t intend to tell them was that, though she was far from being religious, she’d been curious about the chapel and had walked down that way to take a look. She’d stood on the threshold of a small, dimly-lit room with two pews, a lectern and a picture of Jesus kneeling in a garden. Maybe she’d said something in her mind about George. Maybe. It had been quick, just a passing thing. For good luck, if anything else. She’d always figured Jesus was kind of like a four-leaf-clover. A tip wouldn’t hurt either, she’d thought, so she’d put a buck in the slot of a little white lockbox screwed to the top of a table. Next to it was a white book where people wrote down the names of who they were praying for.
Better make it two bucks, she’d decided, but in the end it had been five.
About forty minutes after Berke’s return, an Asian doctor wearing blue scrubs and a surgeon’s cap came into the room. He told them in perfect English, his calm quiet doctor’s voice tinged with a trace of Southern accent, that George was out of surgery and in the ICU, and that the next twelve hours would be, as he put it, ‘the crucial period’. More than that, he couldn’t say. Nomad took that to mean the doctors had done all they were able to and now it was George’s fight.
They thanked him, and after he left they settled back into their places to wait some more. They were good at waiting; they did far more waiting than playing, so they’d made their peace with that necessary aspect of the musician’s life. But never before had they waited out the life or death of a bandmate, and it was going to be a trial for all of them.
And maybe most of all for Nomad. The walls were closing in on him. He hadn’t particularly liked hospitals before his father was shot, but afterwards…when he’d sat in a room similar to this, smelling the hospital’s odors and sensing the impending news, in front of him some dog-eared Batman, Green Lantern and Captain America comics a nurse had found for him, until one of the other Roadmen had come in and told him his dad was gone…
The Month of Death had arrived early this year.
As Ariel and Terry dozed and Berke watched through heavy-lidded eyes an old black-and-white TCM movie with Bette Davis on TV, Nomad stood up. He told Berke he was going downstairs to the machines, and did she want anything. She said no, she was okay.
He left.
At first he’d only intended to walk outside and breathe some non-hospital air, some air without bad memories in it. Then he decided to walk a little ways, not very far, just to get the blood moving. That waiting-room was killing him. To go back to it…no, not right now. He would walk a while down the city block, on this weeping side of three-o’clock.