I meant to ask them to save their singing for some hour when people weren’t trying to sleep, but as I approached, I saw something that irritated me even more than their harmonizing. Three hardy young men were at the edge of the lawn with Mr. Waldman, had dragged him across the street. They were busy winding him up in more of that shiny silver quilting. Elder Bent watched from a few paces away. His bald head was tattooed with a map of the solar system in black-light ink. Mercury and Venus, Earth and Mars, Saturn and Neptune shone with a spectral blue-gray glow on his skull, while phosphorescent dotted lines showed the path they would follow around a goblin-colored sun. I’d heard he’d been a trapeze artist in a former life, and he had the physique to back it up: lean muscle, ropy arms. He wore a silver gown, like all the rest. He also had a large gold astrolabe hung around his neck by a gold chain, a decoration allowed only to the men.
I call them a comet cult, but that’s just a lazy tease and doesn’t really sum up their beliefs at all. Most of them were middle-aged and visibly not right. There was one who had lost all three of her children in a house fire and who would tell you with a smile that they hadn’t died at all—they had crossed into a new, seven-dimensional form of existence. There was a man who put a nine-volt battery in his mouth sometimes, to receive “transmissions” from various religious figures who he said were broadcasting from Neptune. He didn’t hear their voices. He tasted their advice and ideas in the battery’s coppery zing. One parishioner had a lazy eye and a tendency toward nervous spitting fits, as if she’d just gotten a bug in her mouth. Another of the devout had smiley-face scars up and down his arms, the result of deliberate cutting.
It made a person sad to even try to talk to them, the nonsense they believed and the embarrassing things they did. They were all of them waiting on the end of the world, and in the meantime Elder Bent was showing them how to prepare their souls for the seven-dimensional existence that waited beyond death. He kept them busy studying star charts and fixing radios (which they sold at street markets on Saturdays). All of them believed that the final Testament of the Lord would be written not in words but as a diagram for some kind of circuit. I can’t pretend I understood all of it. Yolanda had more patience with Elder Bent’s basket of crazies than I did, had always been sociable with them when she ran into them on the street. She was better than me that way. She felt sorriest for the same people who pissed me off the most.
I was pissed off then, and Yolanda wasn’t on hand to calm me down. I crossed to the edge of their yard, where the three boys were getting ready to roll Mr. Waldman into their silver packing material, and I stamped on the edge of the fabric before they could flap it over him.
The fellows who’d been wrapping him into his sci-fi shroud looked up at me with surprised faces. They were the youngest of Elder Bent’s crew. The first was trim and tall, with a golden beard and shoulder-length hair—he could’ve played Our Lord in a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. The second was a soft, chubby boy, the kind of dude you just know is going to have damp, hot little hands. The third was a black fellow suffering from vitiligo, so the dark of his face was mottled with patches of bright, almost startling pink. They all had their mouths open, as if they were getting ready to speak, but none of them said anything. Elder Bent shot up one hand in a gesture to be silent.
“Honeysuckle Speck! What brings you out on this glorious night?”
“I don’t know what’s glorious about six or seven thousand people getting torn to shreds between here and Denver.”
“Six or seven thousand people have stepped out of these sorry containers of the spirit”—gesturing at his dead—“and have transitioned to the next phase. They’ve been set free! They’re everywhere now, in seven dimensions, their energy the background crackle of reality, the dark matter that holds the universe together. They prepare the way for the next great transmission.”
“What I’d like to know is why Mr. Waldman is transitioning to your front lawn. What makes you think he’d want you to wrap him up in tinfoil like someone’s leftovers?”
“He is one of the forerunners! He goes to mark the way, with so many others. It does no harm to honor his sacrifice.”
“He didn’t sacrifice himself for the likes of you. Mr. Waldman wasn’t part of your cult. He belonged to a synagogue, not a crazy house, and if he’s going to be honored, it ought to be by the precepts of his faith, not yours. Why don’t you leave him alone? Go drink some poison Kool-Aid and ride a comet, you vulture! You don’t know a damned thing.”
He beamed at me, a tall, skinny geek with a glow-in-the-dark head. It didn’t matter how you cussed him out, he always grinned at you like you were a charming scamp.
“But I do!” he said. “A damned thing is exactly what I know: The planet is damned, and I know it! I said the world would end on the twenty-third of November, this very year, at five A.M., and you see now . . . it begins!”
“What about when you said it was going to end in October, two years ago?”
“I said the apocalypse would come on October twenty-third, two years ago, and indeed it did. But it has been developing slowly. Few observers were attuned to the signs.”
“You also said the world would end in 2008, didn’t you?”
He finally looked disappointed in me. “The asteroid that was sure to hit us was turned aside by the combined will of a thousand prayers, to give us more time to perfect our minds for leaving the three-dimensional world. But the day and the hour are almost upon us now! And this time we will not turn the end aside. We’ll welcome it with a happy song in our throats. We’ll sing the curtain down on this life. We have been singing the finish for some time now.”
“Maybe you could get back to singing it in the morning. Some of us are trying to sleep. And while you’re at it, can’t you sing something that isn’t Phil Collins? Haven’t we all suffered enough today?”
“The words don’t matter! Only the joy the singing generates! We store it like batteries. We are almost up to full charge and ready to go! Aren’t we?” he called to his people.
“Ready to go!” they shouted back, swaying a little, staring at the starscape on his bald, bony head.
“Ready to go,” Elder Bent said placidly, lacing his fingers together across his flat stomach. The tattoos on his head glowed in the dark, but the stars on his knuckles had been printed there in plain black ink, while he was in jail. He had served two years for what he’d done to his wife and his stepchildren. He had kept them locked in an attic for most of one summer, giving them a tablespoon of water to split in the morning and one Nilla wafer to share in the evening, and making them map planetary orbits all day. If one of them sassed or didn’t participate in their “studies,” the others were commanded to kick her back into obedience. One evening the wife escaped from him when he allowed the family outside to make star observations. The police threw him in the clink, but he wasn’t there long. He got sprung on appeal, on account of his First Amendment right to practice his religion, which apparently included starving and abusing followers who didn’t sing his hymns in the right key. Worse yet, the stepdaughters rejoined him as soon as he was free. They were devoted sisters of the faith now. They stood just behind him, slim and pretty beneath their hubcap headgear, the both of them giving me the stink eye.