What in God's Name: A Novel (15 page)

Craig sighed. “It doesn’t matter if it’s seventy-two degrees and sunny. He won’t do it.”

“Wow.” Vince wrinkled his nose. “I’m surprised he isn’t fatter.”

“We gave him salmonella,” Eliza explained.

Vince raised his eyebrows, impressed, and Eliza smiled proudly in spite of herself.

“Anyway,” Craig said, “I’ve figured out a way to get Laura outside.”

He pulled up her apartment on his computer and zoomed in on her crumpled jeans.

“She wears these same filthy jeans every day. And the pockets are falling apart.” He clicked his mouse a few times, zeroing in on her left buttock.

“See?” he said, pointing at the tattered fabric. “It’s full of holes. All I have to do is force some contact—make her slip on the sidewalk or something—and her keys will fall right through.”

“That’s perfect!” Eliza said. “She’ll have to call her super and wait for him outside the front door.”

“Exactly. She’ll be set in a specific location.”

“What about Sam?” Vince interrupted. “How do you get him to walk by?”

“I don’t know,” Craig admitted. “Like I said, he always takes the F train to work—one stop, from Essex to Second Avenue. It’s not like we can tell him to stop doing that.”

Vince grinned. “What if we stopped the train?”

Eliza squinted at him suspiciously. “How?”

The Archangel shrugged. “I don’t know. A crash, maybe? Or an earthquake?”

Eliza rolled her eyes. She was about to change the subject when Craig interrupted her.

“We could easily crash the F,” he said. “Just a couple of brake jams, and we could knock it right out of commission.”

“Easy peasy,” Vince agreed.

Eliza stared at her colleagues in shock. “You’re actually considering crashing the F train?”

Craig nodded glumly. “We might have to. You know what a fat ass Sam is. As long as that train is running, he’s going to ride it.”

“I know,” Eliza said. “But if there’s a crash, won’t that cause other problems? We’re talking about fire trucks and ambulances—hundreds of vehicles descending on the Lower East Side. What if some cop barricades Sam’s path?”

Craig sighed. “You’re right. It’s too risky.”

The three of them sat for a minute in silence.

“You know,” Craig said cautiously, “there is another way to stop the train. But it would take some real doing.”

He pulled up a recent
New York Post
article. The MTA was right in the middle of contract negotiations with the union, and the annual budget was due in thirty-six hours. Both sides were “optimistic” about reaching an agreement. But if talks broke down somehow, and the deadline passed, every train in New York would be grounded.

“A transit strike could work,” Eliza said. “But how can we cause the sides to disagree?”

“Yeah,” Craig said. “It’s not like we can control their thoughts.”

“That’s true,” Vince said. “But maybe we can control their moods.”

He slid his swivel chair over to Craig’s computer and grabbed the mouse.

“Why don’t you two take a coffee break?” he said. “I’ve got this one under control.”

Vince scanned the globe. People everywhere were flipping through newspapers, asking tough questions, debating the issues of the day. He laughed to himself. The humans believed that they were rational creatures, governed by their values and belief systems. In fact, almost all of their choices were based on what they had eaten for breakfast, whether or not they had slept well, and how long it had been since their last satisfactory orgasm.

In Vince’s opinion, these three factors—breakfast, sleep, orgasm—accounted for most events in human history. Benedict Arnold was a naturally sour person. But he never would have betrayed his country had it not been for the mosquitoes in his bedroom, depriving him of sleep for weeks and stripping his mind of reason. The Magna Carta might have been an ingenious document. But King John never would have signed it had it not been for his teenage mistress and the generous mood she engendered in her aging ruler.

An undercooked sausage, a snoring spouse—these were the events that shaped the world. Governors were three times more likely to sign a death warrant if they hadn’t had their coffee yet. And surgeons performed best when they were in love. There were other factors at play in human decision-making—allergies, bowel regularity, and headaches, for instance. But almost all were biological and remarkably easy to manipulate. Any Angel worth his wings could do it.

He stared at the screen. A dozen lawyers from the MTA and the Transport Workers Union had gathered in a City Hall conference room. Neither side wanted a strike, but Vince had done his best to make everybody as ornery as possible. His first move was to break an overhead steam pipe. The room’s temperature was eighty-six degrees and climbing fast. None of the lawyers wanted to remove their jackets—taking off one’s clothes could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. But the heat eventually became unbearable. At the ten-hour mark, the lawyers came to a mutual agreement to remove their coats. Four hours later, they agreed to strip to their undershirts. At the twenty-hour mark, one of the junior counsels became so overheated that he pulled his superior aside and asked if he could remove his undershirt and go naked from the waist up. When his request was denied, he walked into the bathroom and passed out.

Vince had also jammed a smoke detector, causing it to beep abrasively every three and a half minutes. The interval was timed to cause the lawyers maximum annoyance: each beep arrived just seconds after they’d forgotten about the last one.

Vince had known in advance which lawyers would attend the meeting and had spent the previous couple of days torturing them. By the time they arrived in the sweltering bunker, their nerves were frayed and their tempers short. Of the six union lawyers, five had the flu, three had ingrown toenails, and two had undiagnosed mono. He’d given the other side a mixture of sunburn, cold sores, and ear infections. The mediator, usually a cheerful presence, remained completely silent for the entire meeting. Vince had given him a case of gonorrhea so horrific that whenever he went to the bathroom, he had to bite his tie to keep from screaming.

By the thirty-six-hour mark, no progress had been made. Every single debate seemed to degenerate into childish bickering.

With a strike imminent, the chief union lawyer struggled to his feet.

“So?” he challenged, his voice scratchy from a bacterial infection. “What’s it going to be? Are you going to agree to our demands or what?”

The lead MTA lawyer looked up wearily. His eyes were bleary from allergies. He was about to respond when a cloud of pollen wafted toward his nose. He sneezed a few times, recovered, and then began to sneeze again, for over a minute straight. When the attack was finally over, he stood up, held his fists above his head, and let loose a wild, uninhibited scream. Then he sat back down and buried his face in his hands.

The strike mediator shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Okay,” he said. “I guess for now we can agree to disagree.”

Laura lay on the icy pavement, dazed and disoriented. It took her a second or two to make sense of her situation: she’d slipped on a frozen puddle and was lying on the sidewalk.

Laura was a clumsy person and fell down pretty often. Still, it always took her by surprise. There was something so shocking about falling. One moment you were completely in control of your limbs. A split second later you were flailing through the air, as spastic as a swatted mosquito.

She spotted a yellow bus and realized with horror that she’d fallen down in front of a school. She could hear the children laughing at her, and when she looked up, she realized that they were mimicking her fall—arms swinging wildly, faces contorted, butts extended. A middle-aged teacher yelled at them to stop, but their impressions were pretty good, and before long he was laughing too.

Laura struggled to her feet with as much dignity as she could muster and fled the scene. She was moving so quickly that it took her five blocks to discover her pocket had ripped open and the keys to her apartment were missing.

She desperately retraced her steps, scanning the ground for shiny objects. But a freak October blizzard had emerged out of nowhere, blanketing the city with snow. The keys were lost for good. There was nothing to do but call the super and wait for him to let her in.

She sat on her stoop, idly scanning old text messages to pass the time. Cliff had sent her a cryptic one a few days ago: “NYC is a soulless town, full of corporate zombies. i must return 2 my birthplace 2 purify my soul.” She couldn’t make much sense of it, but she figured she wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.

She was debating whether to text him back when she heard a familiar sneeze. She looked up and laughed with surprise.

“Sam? Is that you?”

“Laura! Oh my God, what a coincidence!”

The blizzard had been raging for hours, but as Sam shuffled across the icy street, the weather seemed to improve. By the time he got to her stoop, the snow had completely stopped and the sun had emerged for the first time all day.

“What a crazy coincidence!” he repeated. “I never would’ve walked by here if it hadn’t been for the strike!”

“I know! This is so…random!”

They stood for a moment in silence.

“Well!” he said. “I guess I should get going.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice tinged with obvious disappointment. “Well, it was nice running into you.”

“Same! I guess…I’ll see you around?”

“Yeah! I’m sure I’ll see ya.”

They embraced awkwardly, their arms almost fully extended.

“Bye!” Sam said.

He was about to walk away when a jagged chunk of ice fell onto his face.

“Fuck!”

He collapsed on the ground, screaming with fear and pain. “Oh fuck!”

Laura knelt down beside him. “Jesus, Sam—are you okay?”

“No!”

“What in God’s name
was
that?”

“It felt like a fucking knife!”

She spotted an icicle near his face.

“It must’ve been this thing,” she said, lifting up the gleaming spike.

Sam’s eyelids fluttered slightly; he was about to faint.

“Let me see your cheek,” Laura said, prying Sam’s fingers off his face. “Oh, geez…you’re bleeding.”

“I am?” Sam cried, his voice shrill with panic. “Oh my God!”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not so bad.”

She rubbed her finger across his wound. The cut was small, but the flesh around it had already started to darken.

“You’ll probably have a black eye,” she told him. “But it’ll be fine in a day or two.”

Sam lowered his eyes. It looked like he was blushing, though it was hard to tell because his face was so discolored.

“Sorry for losing it,” he murmured.

“That’s okay—I would’ve lost it too! That thing was like the size of a sword.”

They sat for a moment in silence. The snow-speckled sidewalk shimmered in the sunlight, and a fuzzy rainbow arced overhead. Sam made eye contact with Laura, and she anxiously batted her eyes.

“Hey,” he ventured, “maybe we could grab coffee sometime? You know…someplace
indoors.
”

Laura laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “That’d be fun.”

Across the street, a fire hydrant suddenly erupted. Sam laughed. He knew it was crazy, but it seemed like some kind of a sign.

“Another round!” Vince shouted.

Craig nodded and poured out three glasses of bourbon.

“That hydrant at the end was a nice touch,” Vince said.

Craig grinned. “I couldn’t resist.”

“And Eliza, that icicle was badass.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt him, but I had no choice. He was about to bail.”

Vince nodded. “He’s such a fucking pussy.”

“Hey, come on,” Craig said. “He asked her out, right? That took some guts.”

“He didn’t ‘ask her out,’” Eliza said. “He asked her if she wanted to ‘grab coffee sometime.’”

“That’s asking her out,” Craig said.

“No, it’s not! Asking someone out is ‘Do you want to go on a date with me?’ It’s not ‘Do you want to grab coffee?’ I mean,
you
ask me that five times a day.”

Craig’s face reddened. After a moment, so did Eliza’s.

“Well,” Vince said, grinning slyly. “At least we’re making progress, right?”

He threw his arms around their shoulders and raised his glass. “To courtship!”

“To courtship,” they mumbled.

They finished their drinks, and Vince immediately refilled them. Their hands were still shaking from the stress of the last fifteen minutes. They’d worked nonstop for days—spreading flu, manipulating storm clouds, melting icicles—and the humans had almost blown it once again.

“Demolition is scheduled for tomorrow,” Craig said. “Midnight, Eastern Standard Time. So Sam and Laura’s date…or, you know, whatever it is. It’s got to go well.”

Vince and Eliza nodded solemnly.

“Get some sleep,” Craig told them. “Tomorrow is a big day.”

Vince put on his jacket, and Craig followed him over to the elevators.

“You coming?” he asked Eliza.

She shook her head. “I’m going to stick around for a couple of minutes. There’s something I need to take care of.”

Laura ran frantically through the halls of her high school. She was late for something—her sister’s wedding, possibly. And someone had replaced the hallways with city sidewalks, which was extremely inconvenient. She was trying to climb a ladder made of icicles when she felt someone gripping her ankle. She looked down and saw a tired, thin woman with brown bangs. Her clothes were stained with coffee, and her mascara was smudged and faded. But there was something arresting about her. Her blue eyes seemed unnaturally bright, and her pale skin looked almost like it was glowing.

“Do I know you?” Laura asked.

The woman awkwardly thrust out her hand.

“I’m Eliza,” she said. “I’m sorry—I’ve never done this before.” She cleared her throat. “I’m an Angel.”

“Oh, I get it.” Laura said. “So this is a…”

Eliza nodded. “Yeah. Listen…is there somewhere we can talk?”