Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (11 page)

“For the last three and a half months,” Blackmore begins as the unseen crowd hushes themselves, “I've spoken on behalf of the Church of America. I consider myself a good man, a devout man—” He's interrupted as the audience cheers; he gives them a shy, grateful smile so convincing even I'm slightly won over. “However, there are good men, and there are angels. And as we know, my predecessor, Adam Taggart, falls into that last category.

“A week ago, I had a dream. I dreamed the blessed Mr. Taggart and I were in his office, consulting the Book, drinking hot cocoa, as we so often did before he went to his reward. In the dream, I voiced some of the struggles I currently face. ‘Brother,' said I, ‘how can I encourage your people on their path to salvation? How can I speak for them, in a world tormented by evil, by grown men lying with other men'”—his voice gains resonance and the crowd begins to murmur, calling out, “Amen!”—“‘by women who turn their backs on their hearths and descend into promiscuity, by atheists who deny you, by Believers who fail to honor you with their hard-earned dollars'”—Blackmore shouts now, and this last he booms in a furious snarl—“‘by
little girls who spread lies to save their own wretched skins!
'” The audience sounds like thunder; the list has worked up a fury in them. Blackmore feigns exhaustion, takes a long sip of water. Mulvey hands him a towel, with which he gratefully mops his brow. When the crowd finally quiets, he continues.

“In my dream, I asked the Enforcer: ‘Isn't there anyone in this blessed country who'll join me? Isn't there anyone who can help spread Frick's word across this troubled land?' And I'll tell you what happened next: Taggart said nothing at all. He looked me in the eye, pushed the Book to me, and pointed to a passage. It was the parable of the Starbucks.
‘Dost thou recognize me as thy own Father?'
” Blackmore quotes reverently.
“‘You are my child.'”

“Harp.”

She looks at me. I hardly realize her name has come out of my mouth—a drowning sound. I want to warn her of something, but my brain is all white noise. I can't find the words even to think them. I want Blackmore to stop talking. I need him to stop talking.

“When I woke up, I meditated on that a long while,” he continues, “not knowing what it could mean. But soon enough, I found out. What the Enforcer meant was that his work on this doomed planet was not quite finished. What Taggart meant was that he would send us someone he himself could speak through, a man with Taggart's own convictions, his own unparalleled brain, his own blood.

“His only son.”

The audience gasps, but I barely hear them over the high-pitched buzz in my ears. We watch Blackmore step back from the podium and another person enter the frame to shake his hand. “No no no no no,” I hear Harp murmur in horror beside me; she lifts her hands to cover her mouth. I feel a sour pit form in my stomach and I know I'm going to be sick, but I have to watch it first; I have to see it happen. The new person turns from Blackmore to the cheering crowd, and you can hardly make out his face at first because the flash of cameras turns him into a streak of white light, a ghost. For a second there's a look of surprise on his face, but then it melts into a warm smile. When the flashes stop, there's only him and the audience's delight with him: his handsome face and his long fingers waving. The letters pop up in the lower left-hand corner of the screen:
PETER TAGGART, NEW CHURCH OF AMERICA SPOKESMAN.

Peter steps up to the microphone and coughs once, shyly, while the crowd grows still. Blackmore and Mulvey stand off to the side, beaming proudly at him.

“Thank you,” Peter says. “Thank you. Frick bless you.”

The first time I heard Frick address a crowd was right after I attended Church services with my parents after their official conversion. The mass was mostly benign, and I found it weirdly engaging. People came from miles just to kneel at Frick's portrait. The pastor told wild tales—recounting miracles Frick had supposedly performed, describing tortures Non-Believers would face in the months between the Rapture and the planet's ultimate obliteration. Everybody stood to sing “Jesus (Thank You for Making Me American),” a song I'd noticed creeping ever more insistently onto the radio station that played on the bus to school. I remember looking down the pew at my parents and discovering with surprise that they knew all the words.

I decided then that the Church of America was strange, but probably harmless—Mom and Dad seemed happier than they'd been in months, and everyone was so cheerful, so sure of their fate. I didn't think to fear it until we were home, until I opened my laptop and searched for videos of Frick, curious to know more about the weaver of this elaborate fiction. I spent three hours watching YouTube videos of him preaching to crowds in Seattle, Houston, Indianapolis, Washington, DC—as he moved across the country, his speeches grew more and more convincing. It was not because the content made any more sense, because it only became harsher, more scattered. It was because Frick had honed in on the personality that made people fall in love with him. He began with winsome, folksy charm, peppering his speech with a lot of “y'all” and “folks” and “God bless America,” before growing fevered in his predictions and condemnations. He ended always on a pleading note, eyes slightly misty, like he was truly worried about the crowd before him. In retrospect, knowing how tenuous Frick's grasp on sanity was, I imagine he struggled to pull off that initial friendly charisma—the desperation that succeeded it was the real Frick bursting through. But at the time, that first Sunday, as my bedroom grew dim around me and my eyes went glassy from the glow of the screen, all I understood was that Frick was charming and dangerous and he was winning.

In his first appearance as Church spokesman, Peter went a different route. Barreling down the highway toward LA in the predawn hours, I compare Peter's speech to the many of Frick's that I've seen. He didn't scream like Frick used to; he wasn't sweating at the end like he'd run a marathon. If I had to describe Peter Taggart's persona, I'd have to say he acts not entirely unlike one of the two people in this world I thought I could trust: Peter Ivey. He's gentle, handsome, kind, quietly insistent. If you believe him—and who could blame you for believing him?—it's because you can tell, without knowing anything about him, that he's a genuinely good person.

We only watched his speech once before Winnie returned to the car, but it was short and straightforward. I already have it memorized.

“Friends and Believers.” He read from notes but glanced up periodically to hold eye contact with the crowd. “Thank you for this gracious reception. As a longtime Believer, and the proud son of one of its prophets, I am humbled to stand before you today as the new voice of the Church of America. I may be young, but like my father before me, I'm devoted to Frick and his message. In my first act as Church of America spokesman, I'm excited to announce that Pierce Masterson, the Church's most brilliant scholar, has discovered in his research the projected date of the second Rapture. It will occur September twenty-third this year—one day before the apocalypse.” The crowd broke into an excited babble, and Peter paused. Then he looked directly into the camera and said, “These are dark times, but together we wield the most powerful weapon against a world intent on sin and deceit—belief. Trust your heart above all things. Thank you.”

And then the adoring throng erupted, and Blackmore and Mulvey flanked Peter to wave together, and that was the end of the video.

“Are you all right?”

I can barely hear Harp's whisper over the hum of the engine. It's the first she's spoken in hours. I see how exhausted she looks, her eyes a little bloodshot. She grips her laptop tight to her chest, her knuckles white.

“Later,” I reply. Winnie will have to know—Diego, Amanda, and everyone else will have to know—that this person we trusted, this integral part of the story we're trying to tell, lied. That he was working with the Church the whole time. For now, though, I can't handle the idea of anyone other than us three—Harp, me, and Peter—knowing the extent to which I was duped.

Harp reaches across the seat and puts her hand on mine. The weight of it reassures me. I look out the window at the Los Angeles skyscrapers materializing in the predawn light, and without really thinking about it, I lift my other hand to my chest, clutch the sledgehammer pendant that hangs there, and yank it hard, so the string holding it around my neck snaps in two.

In LA, I watch billboards flick past advertising Believer-friendly films, all rushed to production in the last year:
Prophet: The Beaton Frick Story
;
The Second Boat: Judgment Day
;
My Wife's the Devil 2
. They star actors whose sordid secular scandals I still recall from pre-Rapture days, who now pose with upturned eyes, hands folded in prayer, and simpering smiles.

Winnie turns onto a long commercial street lined with tall palms and kitschy shops with brick façades painted a rainbow of colors—lime greens, tomato reds, bubblegum pinks. The sun has risen and the sky's a cheerful artificial blue—the first blue sky I've seen in a month. This is how I imagined California, before these last weeks in blustery San Francisco: all seems bright, optimistic, and utterly synthetic. Winnie parks in front of a small bookstore—The Good Book—and we climb onto the sidewalk and into a dry, furious heat. Harp and I slip off our sweatshirts. All of us glance cautiously up and down the sidewalks. But it's still early—only a little before seven—and we're alone on the street. Winnie takes a deep breath.

“This is the bookstore I told you about.” Her voice is oddly loud. “Let's check it out!”

“It's not even seven.” Harp frowns into the shop's darkened windows. “I don't think they're open. And anyway, is this really the time for shopping?”

Winnie ignores her and pushes through the surprisingly unlocked door. Inside is a musty smell, shelves stuffed to capacity with used paperbacks, a magazine rack in one corner, a wire stand of
GREETINGS FROM LA!
postcards. There's an unnerving Church of America display on one table: leather-bound Books of Frick, spiritual memoirs by Believer basketball players (
Dunking with Jesus
), and a pristine hardcover entitled
Mysteries of the Second Boat Revealed.
Behind the cash register, I realize, is Robbie. He sits up, making a halfhearted attempt to look professional, but he's in the middle of a mammoth sci-fi novel, and the surprise on my face makes him beam.

“Can I help you, ma'am?”

Winnie sticks to a script I don't know. “Do you have a self-help section?”

Robbie nods, letting his expression go serious to match Winnie's tone. “Through the red door in the back and straight up the stairs. Knock twice. You can't miss it.”

She leads us past the stacks to a red door onto which someone—maybe one of the soldiers, feeling cheeky—has tacked a promotional poster of Beaton Frick holding a copy of the Book. The text at the bottom says:
READ! IT'S WHAT JESUS WOULD DO.
Winnie opens the door onto a dark staircase.

“The storefront was Amanda's idea,” she explains as we climb. “She thought we'd be more inconspicuous right in the middle of everything this time. Of course, that was before we were attacked . . .”

She trails off. At the top of the stairs, Winnie knocks twice on a door, and after only a second, it's thrown open. Diego stands in the frame, eyes wide and worried.

“I told you not to stop for anything!” He croaks in his panic, and as Winnie steps inside, he catches her by the arm and pulls her into an embrace. “We got here half an hour ago—I thought you got caught. I thought—”

Winnie slips her arms around him, murmuring into his ear. I take in the rest of the room—it's a large loft apartment renovated into a command center, with rows of desks and laptops against one wall, a big-screen TV playing the Church of America's official twenty-four-hour news network on mute. Elliott hovers by the kitchen, muttering tersely on his phone; when he catches sight of Harp and me, he turns his back without acknowledging us. Birdie and some others huddle on a couch against one wall, their eyes red from crying—Diego will have told them about Karen and Suzy. Kimberly stands in front of the TV with the remote in her hand, and when she catches my eye, I open my mouth to greet her. But her face goes hard.

“Great life choices, Vivian. You must be so proud.”

Behind her on the screen is Peter's earnest face in the video we watched early this morning—the ticker reads
TAGGART'S WORK ON EARTH: NOT DONE
and, in smaller letters,
THE PROPHET'S SON REVEALED DURING CHURCH FUNDRAISER AT CHATEAU MARMONT
. Everyone here has read Harp's blog; they know about Peter and his father. They know Peter stayed behind while we ran; they know he and I were together. The only things they don't know are the things they can't, the things even Harp doesn't understand: the way he looked at me, like I was the person most capable of surprising him; how softly and sweetly he kissed me; how easy it was to believe him. Diego watches me carefully, his arm around Winnie, who stares at the screen in horror. I don't know what to say to them, but luckily, Harp takes over.

“We were just as surprised as you,” she says, moving in front of me as if to shield me. “We never had any reason not to trust him.”

I could weep with gratitude. Harp has every right to rub her good instincts in, to revel in how wrong I was—but instead she's protecting me.

“Except, of course, for the matter of
who his dad was
,” Kimberly notes sarcastically. “Which he was totally up front about, if I remember correctly?”

But of course she knows he wasn't. I remember with a plunging feeling asking him, “Can we trust you?” He said, “Always.” He looked me in the eye.