There is no sign of Ruth. None of Milton. So no one has met him. He squints through the headlight glare at the line of cars idling across the street. Drivers slump in the windows. Passing gypsy cabs beaten and pitted like discarded tins. A riderless city bus kneels by the curb, its wipers swinging at the hail.
His eyes stop on the red sedan at the curb. His two friends are standing a few steps from the car, their collars up against the cold. One gives him an almost friendly nod, as if Nathan's imprisonment-his short brush with safety-had been a little prank they'd all enjoyed together. One actually gives him a wave, and Nathan feels a sudden nervousness at this sign of intimacy, as though it suggests more intimate moments to come. His being in jail was obviously an inconvenience to somebody. Now Nathan is back in play.
He thinks food, to go with the simplicity he sees now in everything, and turns up his collar and pivots left, toward the Stadium, and quickens his pace. Though he knows he is thinning by the minute the rollicking of his body feels heavy. His thighs drag. The flat stretch of sidewalk grows steeper. His wet clothes are plastered to his legs and back, but the cold is still vague and distant, as if he has sunk into a kind of anesthetized drunk. Still, he hugs himself, and, with a vacant pleasure at life's little things, strolls on. The neighborhood around the courthouse a blur of brick and pigeon-stained facade and window holes blinded with sheets of plywood, speechless in asking the question, Why does anyone live here? This underside of a universe that contains grand boulevards, parks, monuments, opera houses, seas. Traffic lights that twirl like toy lanterns. He heads toward the illuminated globes for the C and D lines, watching the speeding clouds through the tracks of the El above. At the subway entrance, an unmanned cargo van sits parked at the curb, its side panels asking ARE YOU SAVED YET? A pair of pink cherubs with wings hover in profile, facing each other across a sliding side door airbrushed with gold leaf to depict pearly gates. The quarterpanel offers to make, free of charge, Nathan's travel arrangements to the beyond, 1-800-FLY-HOME.
He teeters at the top step, peering down into the subway, propped by the dank air blasting up at him and the icy rain at his back, taking measure of his options. He makes a mental note: call Planetarium Travel about ticket to Roatdn, one-way. Though for this trip out to the house he needs only his car, his bag, the dog. They will be downtown at his office. If Schreck didn't give them away. Or take them himself; the pictures float by: Schreck sitting behind his desk, Schreck walkin Baron, sleeping in his bed, driving his car, eating dinner with Mom and Dad, the son they never had; standing on Claire's step, ringing her bell. A tasty thought: could that have been him calling her this morning? Would it have been him? There has been no consistency to his self-deceptions, why should there be a logic to the cast of his deceivers? Why can't they all-all his people, all his lies-know one another? Why don't they? But they must.
All around him crowds are heading for the subway. But there is something peculiar. They are all young women, Dominicans and Hondurans-Nathan overhears them as they pass-either pregnant or cradling fresh babies or with small children in tow. They seem to come mostly from the direction of the storefront Good News Chapel and Prayer Hall behind him. Nathan follows them down.
Before the token booth, the crowd has drawn around a huge black man in a white judo suit cinched with a black belt. Between the women and the martial artist stands a ring of white teenagers, mostly blond, the boys dressed in ironed khakis and argyle sweaters and the girls in the candy-striped dresses of Connecticut WASPS. The tallest boy holds before him a stack of five stubby planks.
The martial artist rolls his sleeves. "This isn't going to get it, no!" he booms. He makes a sweeping gesture back behind them and up the subway stairs and out into the streets above. "No, this just isn't going to do it. Friends, this isn't where it's at. The power of God, friends, the power of baptism, surges through my arms, my legs, my feet. It's here, it's here-"
Leaning back and lifting his right leg, the black-belt preacher uncoils at the stack of planks and halves it with his heel with a sharp crack that matches a peal of thunder overhead. His assistant displays the shattered wood to the audience like a game-show hostess.
Your children can have this power, they can all be saved this very day, the preacher says. "You will need the strength to flee the clutches of the Antichrist. Because he is among us, friends. You have all heard it. That is why I am here, running from the storm in the bowels of this great city. I pledge to you on my faith he will make himself known on Christmas Day and will mark for doom all those guilty of disbelief and all those unsprinkled with holy waters. Look at the storm over our heads. I'm telling you the born and the unborn and the almost dead-it don't matter to the Antichrist. All those unbaptized will suffer and burn beside him in Hell."
The preacher is grinning. The teenagers, their eyes twinkling with love, are handing out pamphlets. As if in exchange the parents offer up their babies. Those merely pregnant eye with dismay and panic their swollen bellies.
"You. What about you. Are you saved?"
Nathan looks at the preacher, who had picked him out and peers at him over the crowd.
The preacher answers himself: "No."
Nathan rests both hands on his chest in false modesty. "I'm Jewish," he says, and almost chokes on the excuse. It's half a lie, the bigger half. He'd be a fallen Jew if Jews actually fell; but here they remain working the earth, working it hard.
The preacher points. "This one isn't saved," he cries, as if it isn't obvious, Nathan and his soaked clothes and stubbled jaw and filthy hands. "He thinks because he's a Jew that makes him ineligible." He makes a motion and a girl in a blue print dress comes forward with a porcelain bowl of water. "Friend, don't miss the point. The Lord doesn't care what you are."
"I think He would," Nathan replies softly.
The preacher glares and makes it simple: "Come beside me if you want to be saved."
Nathan gives his head a shake.
"If not you, then who?"
It is a good question. Nathan considers Claire but, figuring news of this gift in her honor would get back to her, does not want to add to her resentment. Willfully, he draws a blank.
But the preacher is patient. He'll wait. He has all day, all eternity. And it must be obvious Nathan is trying. Then a solution does actually strike him. "A friend," Nathan finally says.
The preacher's grin widens. "Born or unborn?"
Nathan steps by, twisting through the crowd and the phalanx of purebred angels and stops toe-to-toe with the preacher. He is reminded of his moment in the sun on his bar mitzvah morning, standing beside the rabbi staring out at the tuxedo sea, the gangster faces imported for the day by Milton, drug lords and porn kings, assistant district attorneys and even a pair of judges, as on those Thanksgiving mornings a truce called, battle lines forgotten for a holy importance. Sunbeams crashing down like piano chords from the stained-glass synagogue windows. His mother swaddled in pastel gauze. His father-he still can't see the fat face hidden behind his glasses, behind a carpetbagging smile. Soft-focus rite of man. Entrance into adulthood's blood cult.
The preacher dips a ladle in the water and lifts it high and Nathan raises his hands to ward it off.
"Not me," he insists.
The preacher, not missing a beat, closes his eyes, bends his head at a solemn angle and, genuflecting slowmotion over the empty space beside Nathan, begins, "In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost-"
The others mouth the words to themselves, and Nathan is alone amongst them. But not entirely alone. There are the hanging stalactites overhead. Nathan feels more in common with them than the flock gathered around. More even than with the empty space beside him, the empty shell of his potential.