Free Heathern by Jack Womack Page B

everything."
    "If They're separate," I asked, "what tore Them apart?"
    Signs noting curfew were so peppered by gunblasts that
they could have been used as graters. As two halftracks
rumbled downtown no fresh shots rang out, no footsteps
echoed but our own, and none in command chose to stop us
for interrogation. I dreamed of safety, so close to home.
"Creation," he said.
    "How?"
    "A difficult birth," he said. "Whether They're truly split,
I'd hate to say. I'm not sure that They even know. It's a
spiritual division more than a physical, I believe."
    "If They are split," I said, "could They ever reunite?"
    He nodded. "There's a problem in that."
    "What else is new?-"
    "If They do, the world will be made anew. But that means
the world as we know it must end."
    "It must?" I asked. "You know that?"
    "They pull up the corner of a blanket sometimes and
show me what's underneath. When They feel like it They
show me something else. It's up to me to draw the
inferences. The blind men and the elephant, nothing
more."
    King Street was a block away; something hung from my
corner's lamppost but it didn't look as if it had ever been
alive. Tank-treads rutted the new-tarred pavement, looking
as fossils on the land. "Thanks for walking with me," I said.
"I live around the corner. Would you like to come in?"
    "Sure."
    "I'm sorry I ask so many questions," I said.
    "You know the story of Job?" Hearing no response, he continued. "Job questioned God. God questioned Job in
return. They made an arrangement and Job returned to his
life. Years later a stranger called on Job, demanding to know
the answer to a question. 'He tells you to speak to Him as an
equal and you let Him treat you like that?' the stranger
asked, and Job answered, 'Listening to Him as He spoke I
realized that the Creator may need neither sense nor sanity
to do as He does, and that our failings in such may be more
godlike than we know. It seemed most reasonable to agree
with everything He said."'

    I brushed the day's debris from my steps with my foot
into a neat pile at the bottom. My neighbor screamed,
welcoming us home; Lester seemed afraid until he saw I
could no longer respond to her voice. Bernard once told me
how the screams of children in his building kept him awake
at night. "That wasn't all that happened," Lester continued.
"'You have no more questions?' God asked Job, he told the
stranger, and Job had one more question, but worried that
he'd tested God too much, and so for an endless time only
mouthed the word with his lips. 'You don't learn if you
don't ask,' God said.
    "'Why?' Job finally asked, but God was gone."

     

FIVE

    Switching off the alarms I flipped on the overheads,
bringing light throughout my house. "This is all your
place?" Lester asked, hovering behind me as if fearful to
step further into the entry. Once he came in I reset the
alarm, locked the five locks, slid the police bar back up. If
anyone lay in wait I had a gun in my purse, but I had never
had to use it.
    "Plus the floor upstairs. They call it a duplex but it's
enough for thirty. It's Thatcher's place, really. A gift until
he wants it back."
    The previous owners favored the sort of decor that
resulted in its having appeared in expensive journals, years
before. Most of the rooms were the width of the house,
divided by walls painted in Navaho white and floored with
blond wood. Lester wandered through the living room, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the furniture, and
studied an abstract I had hanging above the fireplace.
Looking anew into its painted swirls I wondered how my
friend had known what angels swarmed over heaven.

    "It's called 'Driven to Pieces in Pursuit of Love,"' I said.
"A girlfriend of mine painted it. She did a number of works
that no one ever bought. Except this one."
    "It's awful dark," he said. "She did this recently?"
    It was dark; the angels smothered in vast clouds of dust,
tumbling wing over wing as they spiraled