The capital even smelled sick. Washington had become a city of long, sad lines, drawn faces, rumpled clothing. Everyone feared people in long coats, delivery trucks, boxes left on streets, and posters taped to walls demanding obscure justice and hiding thin, nasty bombs beneath to blow up those who would try to take them down.
Only the clowns and the monsters looked healthy and happy. Only clowns and monsters found their careers advancing in Washington, D.C., in the fifteenth year of SHEVA.
The driver told her the hearing had been delayed and they had some time to kill. Kaye asked him to stop in front of a Stefano’s bookstore on K Street. She thought about eating but she could not rouse an appetite. She just wanted to be alone for a few minutes to think.
Kaye pulled up the strap on her shoulder bag and entered the retail-grade checkpoint outside the bookstore. A large, heavy guard in an ill-fitting uniform with all the buttons straining looked her over with a blank expression and motioned for her to apply thumb to scanner, then waved her through the metal detector. Sniffers whuffed, checking for traces of explosives or suspicious volatiles.
Perfume had become a no-no in the city.
“Clear,” the guard said, his voice like soft thunder. “Y’all have a good evening.”
Outside, the rain began to fall. Kaye looked back through a display window and saw trash floating down the gutters, paper bags and cups bobbing along. The gutters were clogging and water would soon back up.
She knew she needed some food. She should not attend the hearing on an empty stomach, and she had not eaten since ten that morning. It was five now. Soup and sandwiches were available at a small café inside the store. But Kaye walked past the menu board without stopping, on some sort of autopilot. Her walking shoes made damp sucking sounds on the linoleum as she passed several deep aisles of bookshelves. Fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed overhead. A young man with long felted hair sat on a patched chair, half-empty knapsack crumpled in his lap, asleep. A paperback Bible lay open facedown on the arm of the chair.
God sleeping.
Without thinking, Kaye turned right and found herself in the religion section. Most of the shelves were filled with brightly colored apocalypse novels. E-paper holograms leaped from lurid covers as she passed: end time, rapture, revelation, demons and dark angels. Most of the books had speaker chips that could read out the entire story. The same chips replaced jacket copy with vocal come-ons. The shelves murmured softly in a wave, like ghosts triggered by Kaye’s brief passage.
Serious theology texts had been crowded out. She found a single shelf concealed high in the back, near the brick wall. It was cold in that corner and the books were worn and dusty.
Eyes wide, ill at ease, Kaye touched the spines and read one title, then another. None seemed right. Most were contemporary Christian commentaries, not what she was looking for. Some lashed out angrily at Darwinism and modern science.
She turned slowly and looked down the aisle, listening to the books, their competing voices sibilant like falling leaves. Then she frowned and returned to the lone shelf. She was determined to find something useful. She tugged out a book called Talking With the Only God. Skimming through five pages, she found big print, wide margins, self-righteous but simple instructions on how to live a Christian life in troubled times. Not good. Not what I need.
She replaced the book with a grimace and turned to leave. An older man and woman blocked the aisle, smiling at her. Kaye held her breath, eyes shifting. She was sure her driver had come into the store but could not remember seeing him.
“Are you seeking?” the man asked. He was tall and skeletally thin with a short cap of braided white hair. He wore a black suit. The way his coat sleeves rode up his wrists reminded Kaye of Mitch, but the man himself did not. He looked determined and a little fake, like a mannequin or a bad actor. The woman was equally tall, thin through the waist but with fleshy arms. She wore a long dress that clung to her thighs.
“I beg your pardon?” Kaye asked.
“There are better places to seek, and better texts to find,” the man said.
“Thanks, I’m fine,” Kaye said. She looked away and reached for another book, hoping they would leave her alone.
“What are you seeking?” the woman asked.
“I was just browsing. Nothing specific,” Kaye said, avoiding their eyes.
“You won’t find answers here,” the man said.
The driver was not in sight. Kaye was on her own, and this probably wasn’t serious anyway. She tried to appear friendly and unconcerned.
“There’s only one valid translation of the Lord’s words,” the man said. “We find them in the King James Bible. God watched over King James like a holy flame.”
“I’ve heard that,” Kaye said.
“Which church do you attend?”
“No church,” she said. She had come to the end of the aisle and the pair had not moved. “Excuse me. I have an appointment.” Kaye clutched her purse to her side.
“Have you made peace with God?” the woman asked.
The man lifted his hand as if in benediction. “We lose our families, the families of God. In our sin, in homosexuality and promiscuity and following the ways of the Arab and the Jew, the pagan gods of the Web and TV, we stray from the path of God and God’s punishment is swift.” He swept his hand with a scowl at the whispering books on the shelves. “It is useless to seek His truth in the voices of the devil’s machines.”
Kaye’s eyes crinkled. She suddenly felt angry and perversely in control, even predatory, as if she were the hawk and they were the pigeons. The woman noticed the change. The man did not. “Terence,” the woman said and touched the man’s elbow. He looked down from the ceiling, meeting Kaye’s steady glare and reeling in his spiel with a surprised galumph and a bobble of his Adam’s apple.
“I’m alone,” Kaye said. She offered this like bait, hoping they would bite and she would have them. “My husband just got out of prison. My daughter is in a school.”
“I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” the woman asked Kaye with an equal mix of suspicion and solicitude.
“What kind of daughter?” the man asked. “A daughter of sin and disease?” The woman tugged hard on his sleeve. His Adam’s apple bobbled again, and their eyes darted over her clothes as if looking for suspicious bulges.
Kaye squared her shoulders and shoved out her hand to get through.
“I know you,” the man continued, despite his wife’s tugging. “I recognize you now. You’re the scientist. You discovered the sick children.”
Confined by the aisle, Kaye’s throat closed in. She coughed. “I have to go.”
The man made one last attempt, brave enough, to get through to her. “Even a scientist in self-centered love with her own mind, suffocating in the fame of television exposure, can learn to know God.”
“You’ve spoken to Him?” Kaye demanded. “You’ve talked to God?” She grabbed his arm and dug into the fabric and the flesh beneath with her fingernails.
“I pray all the time,” the man said, drawing back. “God is my Father in Heaven. He is always listening.”
Kaye tightened her grip. “Has God ever answered you?” she asked.
“His answers are many.”
“Do you ever feel God in your head?”
“Please,” the man said, wincing.
“Let him go,” the woman insisted, trying to push her arm between them.
“God doesn’t talk to you? How weird.” Kaye advanced, pushing both back. “Why wouldn’t God talk to you?”