But Kenneth keeps going. “I fear we are making a terrible mistake,” he says, quietly but urgently. “By our deception. A terrible mistake. And it’s not too late, Anna. It’s not too late to take care of this properly.”
“To take care of it properly!”
The euphemism is too much for Annabel to bear. She pivots toward her husband, wielding the still-humming slicer. “You mean bring her to the Center and tell them that she can’t hear! Leave her behind. Abandon our daughter. Our only child! We travel through tomorrow—we go on to Glory—and she stays and rots.” She bares her teeth, jabs the slicer angrily. “That’s what you mean.”
Kenneth pushes back his chair and stands.
“What the theologians say—”
“I know what they say.”
“Let me—can I finish?”
Annabel gestures with the slicer. The blood from the meat flies from it and splatters on the old thick carpet of the living room. The towers of the city loom in the the windows. Lights glow in the distance; the black sky punctuated by gold and gleam. Annabel jerks her thumb onto the lever of the slicer and the hum of it is loud and keen. The blade hums into the meat. Annabel cuts while Kenneth watches. It’s what, 8:15 now? He raises his voice.
“They say that only those who have heard may come through.”
“She has heard her whole life. She has heard from us.”
“Only those—”
“From her teachers. From her friends.”
“Only those who have heard directly may travel through. Or else—”
“She has heard her whole life,” Annabel says again.
Kenneth’s face is trembling. He paces with his hands behind his back.
“We are defying His will.”
“You don’t know what He wants.”
“Of course I do!” says Kenneth. “He talks to me.”
“He talks to me, too! He talks to everyone.”
Kenneth shakes his head bitterly. “Not everyone,” he says.
There is then a long silence in the room. Annabel stops moving. She gives up all pretense of continuing work on the tartare. She cannot do it properly unless she is paying attention. The instructions from the theologians are quite clear: thin slices of beef, as thin as paper, as thin as skin. The meat must be sliced very thin so that the poison can soak its way through: so the poison can saturate the flesh, striate each thin piece, marble each slice with the will of God.
BRING HER TO ME, Annabel hears. BRING HER TO ME. It gives her courage. Steels her voice and steadies her hand.
“Okay, so fine. She doesn’t hear. So she’s never received the instructions. But we have, and we have told her, and she has shown no hesitation, no reluctance, because she trusts us. She trusts us and she trusts in God even though she has never heard Him. This is her test, and it is our test.”
Kenneth crosses his arms and stares out the window at the looming buildings. Annabel comes over and stands beside him, holds his shoulder with one bloodied hand.
“She has to come,” says Annabel, and her voice has changed now. She is not telling Kenneth, she is pleading. Asking him. With love: for him, for their child, for God. “She has to eat of it and come through with us. We will not give her up. We will not leave her behind.”
The meal will be served in the morning. The morning of May 1st, the long and longingly awaited. Annabel takes his other shoulder, looks him in the eyes.
“She is our daughter and she is coming through with us tomorrow. Coming along like everyone. Do you agree?”
Kenneth turns away. The voice is in his head, too, God’s voice, Annabel knows that. She wonders what it is saying at that moment but she is afraid to ask. She steps closer.
“Do you agree?”
The first to hear was a girl named Jennifer Miller, just a regular girl, just like anyone, from Building 14—this is when there was a Building 14. This is twenty-four years ago.
And God just came along to Jennifer Miller, when Jennifer Miller was still a child, almost, when she was thirteen years old. And God began to speak to her and told her that all of this would end in her lifetime, and Jennifer Miller thought that she had gone crazy, and when she told others, in her building and at her academy, they thought that she had gone crazy, too. Of course they did.
This was when things were still good but beginning to get bad.
Jennifer Miller, in time, began to believe that she really was hearing a voice; and then that the voice was really God’s voice; and then that what He was telling her was true.
TIME IS SHORT, is all He said in those first years. To her, and then at last to others. In various of the buildings; in various of the floors; His voice, mighty like a ram’s horn or hushed like the purposeful whisper of a child playing telephone, was now being heard. TIME IS SHORT.
And then, as the years went on—and the buildings slipped along on their various rates of decay—the messages began to vary, some people hearing certain things and others hearing other things. Soon everyone heard, and soon the instructions became clear and specific and nobody thought Jennifer Miller was crazy any longer, because everybody could hear. A man named Ronald Clarke was the first to be told the day, and a woman named Barb Ruiz, of Building 2, was given to know the method.
Eventually He let there be no ambiguity. He showed himself to be a democratic God, and a clarion God. He let the word ring out and ring true to alclass="underline" Here is my will and here is how it shall be, it shall be by feast, by joyous gathering around tables of poison. These crumbling buildings we will leave behind, these frail bodies, and all of us will travel through together, on the first of May of the appointed year.
And now at last, the day of the feast has come and it will be in the morning.
Pea waits until her parents are gone. She sneaks silently up the stairs.
She sits in her tiny room like she sat under the table in the kitchen, with her knees clasped to her chest and her body trembling. A frail flower.
It’s past midnight, now. Just past. It’s very dark outside, no stars.
She has spent her whole life pretending, and at least that’s almost over.
She has learned to do the thing they do, tilt her head back and half-close her eyes, listening. Stop in the middle of a conversation and mouth silent words, as if in conversation with a ghost.
Now it’s all almost over.
They live in Building 170. It is called that because it was the 170th one built, of the original two-hundred, but there are only sixty-three left now.
Pea sits on her bed and looks out the window at the bleak black horizon, and her life is almost over.
Her parents are good parents—they love her despite her deafness—but she knows it is a source of pain and shame to them. She knows one literally deaf child; that girl’s name is Sharon. She is in the lower group, still, two years behind Pea. She literally cannot hear. Pea can hear but she can’t hear God.
Pea picks up her journal and then puts it down again. No point now—no sense. She has never written the truth in it. Too risky. She has hidden her secret her whole life, without her parents ever telling her to. Without needing to be told. Her whole life has been one ache, one absence.
She lies down on the bed. Tomorrow it will all be over. One way or another. Sleep flickers in and out of her eyes. Dream scraps, stitched together strangely: Her father riding on the Building 170 elevator, pointing the lever up; her mother carving something that is not meat.
She is awoken by a nervous plink-plink on the window. She sits upright and stares at the window. Her nightgown is gold-colored and old and ratty. There it is again: Plink—plink. Like fingertips gently rapping on the glass.