With and Without Class (7 page)

Verch coughed and unfastened his waist. He bled along his forehead and chest as the wheel-car slowed behind them. He snatched the pistol from Murphy's hand and punched buttons on the gun's panel. “Get out!” he called to Laura, “We're getting out.” He unfastened Murphy and shoved him, retracting the passenger door.

Traffic screams of cars struck with machine gun cadence. Laura groaned. He yanked her arm. She found the embankment a split-second before him. It was up ahead on the right. Cars flashed by below. Further down, the Pacific lapped a rocky beach. He headed toward it.

Laura staggered in the opposite direction.

“Come here!”

She was grabbed and pulled close with the pistol pointed at her stomach. Their shadows stretched toward the Pacific as she wiped dust from her sweaty face and touched a cut on her forehead.

He pulled her down and along the embankment toward a retainment sheet of gravel. Streetlight from the highway hit sharp facets and she watched her footing as she stepped.

He pulled her. “Get the fuck over!”

A rustling came from the highway shoulder. Boots crushed grass. He stood over six feet in blue pants and tan short-sleeves. Blood trickled through runlets from his chest to his boots as the .357 swung loose from his arm and gusts fluttered his raven hair.

Verch sighted the crosshairs on the man's face.

Laura's stomach plummeted. She met the officer's stoic eyes—archetypical eyes, like the angel Gabriel.

The officer raised a walky-talky to his mouth, “There's four of them.”

“What?” Verch asked.

Laura looked behind them, but there were only the two of them on the embankment. She noticed the man looking off at something slightly over their heads.

“You don't look good, man,” Verch sputtered. “Why don't we call it a night? That's fair. Fair… right?”

The walky-talky issued a garbled message. The man responded, “White van. New Mexico plates. I'll check it out.”

Verch glanced over his shoulder again. “New Mexico?”

The gun swayed as the officer walked. He polished blood from his badge with the bronze points spinning out the streetlights in star-gleams.

Laura winced and blinked away the spots in her vision.

“Ah,” Verch yelled and grimaced from the light as crimson pulses spun and launched from his gun.

The grass behind the man ignited.

“What?” Verch staggered over the rocks.

She was pulled into his side with the pistol against her neck.

Behind them, hordes of cars flashed in cross-traffic with the tide crashing over and through boulders. Verch laughed and grew pale, “Do you know who I am?” he staggered, sliding through gravel, “I'm a Transpurton. I'm, I'm Verch—Verch—Transpurton!”

The boots stopped.

“My family owns four corporations!”

Her hair was clenched and pulled. She shrieked.

“We can negotiate this out like men. Like men!” He stumbled and gathered.

“Two suspects armed with shotguns. She's pregnant.”

“You crazy man?” Verch asked. “Ain't nobody pregnant over here?”

“No,” the man told his walky-talky. “
I can help her.
”

“You can't help her. You can't help anyone in this world, man, you know that. But
we
can make a deal!”

The officer discovered him. He locked onto Verch with his stoic eyes, “No deals!” He swung the .357 up and grasped it two-handed as he drew in a low stance.

Verch's eyes widened, “Wait—wait—no—I—!”

The barrel flashed red-yellow. Gray tendrils rose up fast in a fickle breeze. Verch jerked and rolled down the hill as his arms and legs bounced against the rocks. And for precious seconds his death snarl was still straddling the mountains of a lusty madman and a baby reborn.

The officer holstered his gun. His voice was tired: “You're safe,” he said. “You'll be alright. I promise.” He turned from her and began to walk away.

She balanced herself; her stomach grumbled and her knees were weak. She looked up, “Why?”

He stopped, “It's my job.” Then he continued up the hill. He fell to his knees and then onto his side.

A traffic controller rumbled overhead; its spotlights blinded her as it swooped toward the highway.

She looked along the embankment, again. The impression of a body had pressed the grass flat with the bloody blades now gleaming and flittering in the rising wind and white light.

Her stomach churned. She swooned, falling backward into a soft bed of powdery gravel.

As the traffic controller was landing, a huge lavender sky loomed above her. She felt peaceful as she imagined the officer's promise for the rest of her young life.

 

Soulmate Divorce

H
arold and Patty
were high school sweethearts. They rushed from their senior prom to a damp log cabin lit with a few candles and lost their virginity. And they stayed a couple throughout college with only one minor spat, which, though conducted in public at a local tavern, was also nauseatingly romantic (something about growing pains), then they got married and had three kids: a sharp-witted boy and two beautiful girls. They prospered across forty years of passion and tenderness, raising their family and their enviously adorable grandchildren, thereby solidifying their claim as quintessential soulmates. Everything carried out perfectly—almost too perfect. So it was no surprise to their friends that not some fifty years after Patty reunited with Harold in Heaven they opted to file jointly for divorce, listing irreconcilable differences.

They had become different people during the years they spent separated by The Great Divide and Harold had started to need his space. He'd look at his wife and think: who is this person? she's like a stranger. They'd always liked different things but there were fewer distractions now. When they were alive it was hard to keep things fresh, but at least they had the physicality. Physicality is a good thing. It limits you and confines you in the moment. There's nothing worse than making love to your wife and being caught drifting off to marvel the battle of Gettysburg. “Yes! Yes… Honey?” she'd say and cringe, “Are you in Gettysburg, again. Goddamnit!” And he knew she was pissed, taking His name in vain with Him so close by.

And there were other things, of course. Like the argument over the house, that's when it really came to a head. Harold said, “Why do we have to spend all our time in the Third Street House. Why do you always resist my attempts to conjure the house from Georgia? Now that was a house.”

“You like this house,” Patty said, rifling through junk mail with her back to him and eating a perfect peach. “It's your favorite.”

“Yah, but it can't be my favorite
forever
.”

She stopped eating and lowered the mail. “Harold, I'm cheating on you.” She turned to face him.

“What?” Harold walked to her; he felt his heartbeat, again, and that old sensation of blood rushing to his face as he looked deep into those pretty green eyes that held perfectly still. “That doesn't make any sense. This is Heaven. There's no cheating in Heaven.”

Patty sneered, flinging the mail across the black granite island and turning away. “That's what you always do. You always tell me the rules. Use doorknobs. Don't walk through doors at dinner parties. Haunt the granddaughter in her dreams, not when she's screwing that wannabe musician and it would do her the most good.”

“There's no cheating in Heaven!”

She turned back to him, “Harold, I want a divorce.”

“Fine.” Harold stormed out of the kitchen and conjured the siege of Constantinople. His shout echoed across the abyss, “FINE-FINE-fine-fin…”

Harold kicked sand, walking through the dark and musty limestone stables. Black stallions plodded and whinnied—nervous from battle. Blood dripped near the hoof of a brave one that wouldn't stop eyeing him and Harold was tempted to ride her bareback into the dusty night and forget the effects of rippling the timeline. He sighed and looked down at straw and dirt.

He wondered why he hadn't immediately demanded to know who she had been sleeping with. He couldn't think of anyone it could be. Back on Earth the act of sex could only potentially create a unique soul of infinite will and duration. When you had sex in Heaven the stakes were a bit higher than that. Nothing to trifle with. Still he was somehow more troubled by the idea of divorce itself. Divorce was prevalent in Heaven since a lot of the marriages grandfathered into Heaven were done in a spurious manner, sometimes just a few years before The Great Divide was crossed. But he'd never heard of soulmates getting a divorce in Heaven. And that's what they were, right? soulmates. Their case would be tried by one of the primary emanations of God and that in itself seemed risky. When he had his first brush with God (the Nineteenth Emanation) during Extra Terrestrial and Pre-Hominid Orientation, he thought for an instant he had been dissolved—dissolved down to what seemed his atoms, into a sea of peace.

The idea of divorce didn't make complete sense to him. And she could afford a much better lawyer. She was a surgeon in her past life and she had taken most of it with her. He had a lot of his money tied-up in his internet business and it wasn't panning out yet. You see, a lot of old people choose to stay old after they die because they grow to hate the young so much and he was going to teach those old people to make Webpages and file their taxes online. So now he could only afford a decently good lawyer. Someone like Sammy. Sammy the ATM Machine, oh, it was going to be embarrassing.

Sammy was peripherally linked into their circle of friends. It was rumored he liked going by the name Sammy so much that he became Sammy the ATM Machine simply because everything else he could think of was taken. But Harold didn't believe it. Harold made an appointment and tried not to get annoyed by the fact that his secretary made him wait fifteen minutes in the receiving alcove, just for show. His office was dark brown, somewhat Victorian with leather bound book collections and Sammy sitting attentively in a high-back leather chair between an open-curtained bay window and a handsome wood desk.

Harold smelled cigar smoke. “You look good, Sammy. Life-like.”

“Thanks,” the words issued from his black money slot and green text on his screen flashed with his syllables, “It took me a while to get the arms and legs to look natural and not too robotic. I'm very sorry to hear of this divorce, Harold. Are you sure about this?”

“We're sure. We've talked it over and we think it's for the best. She cheated on me, Sammy.”

Sammy tapped pale-blue plastic fingers pensively over the lacquered desktop.

“Walk me through the basics of this Sam—”

He raised a hand, “Sammy.”

“Sorry. Sammy. Walk me through the basics. If we both know and agree we want this divorce, why can't we just conjure it and be done with it?”

“Harold, take a seat. Please.”

Harold pulled a crimson leather chair closer to the desk and sat.

Sammy's screen seemed to lock with his gaze, “The essence of the truth of these matters is equal parts intention and manifestation.”

“What?” Harold asked.

“We gotta do this thing to prove our case.”

“Oh.”

“Now, you'll be going up against the DEMM; it's important you know that.”

“What?”

“The DEMM. The Deus ex Machina Machine.”

“Huh?”

“The Eighth Emanation of God. The Deus ex Machina Machine. That's what the Emanation calls Himself. He creates impossible resolutions. A handy trick in divorce court.”

“Oh.” Harold cringed, “Wait… what do you mean,
I'll
be up against?”

“Harold, I'm just your counsel. You and Patty are going to have to settle things yourselves with the DEMM.” Sammy leaned back into his high-back leather chair and spun a little. “You might have the mistaken idea that a Heavenly divorce is like a material one. It's not. In material divorce we split up property and assets. In Heavenly divorce we divvy up ideas. She wouldn't just get the house, for example, she'd get the idea of it, all the memories, textures, nuances and pleasures derived from its contemplation, images and emotions. That's serious business, Harold. You've been together so long, we're not talking about a legal matter, we're talking about an amputation of a big part of yourself. When I'm dealing with some octogenarian billionaire looking to extricate himself from the floozy he married just to get one last taste-a-the-tang, I say go for it, but this, this is different, Harold.”

“Why do we have to split up all our ideas, anyway?”

“You earned those ideas together. After the divorce you can't share them anymore and truly be separated in any meaningful way. We have to separate the spiritual currency.”

“What? You mean ideas are like money? But we still use money.”

“Harold, what have you been doing all this time? Don't tell me you have all your money in stocks and bonds. Money buys ideas. It's all the same thing. Money equal ideas. So we have to split it up. You have to think this through.”

“I know. I've thought it through. It still just feels right. It feels like the right thing to do. We can't go on like this, Sammy.”

“Harold,” Sammy leaned forward, green ‘Would you like a receipt?' text flashing, “Harold, look at me. You've been here, what, fifty some years. Take it from me. This place can be overwhelming. You come here and it seems for the first time you've got infinite power, infinite choices. But then there are people still trying to tell you what to do and it can be frustrating—infuriating. You just want to show them a thing or two. But you still have to make sound decisions. Let me tell you, Harold, sometimes—sometimes those decisions can stick with you for a long time—” Crisp, green bills flitted out, stacking themselves onto his tray and he swatted at them, cramming them inside a desk drawer. “Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Harold?”

“Yes. Believe me; I really do. It's just. It's over. I have to finish this.”

“Okay,” Sammy said. “In that case, the first thing you do when you get into the court room is…”

*

Harold found her sitting alone with her elbow resting on the worn green wood of the dark tavern's bar. A glass of water with lemon sat untouched near her left hand as she studied a form. She wore her black and white silk suit and her forties-face, her arguing face.

“Hello,” Harold said. He pulled out a stool and sat. “Is this the bar we had our college fight at?”

“Yes. The owner made a recreation of it after he died.” She turned the page on her form. “You're almost an hour late. Isn't this important to you?”

“It is. I found the directions you left to this place on the refrigerator door. They were a bit off.”

“They weren't off. We just think of things differently.”

“I have them right here.” Harold dug into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper to show her. “It says Happiness137 Ambivalence228 Malaise092.” He watched for a change in her expression. “It's the wrong
Emotional Address
. Happiness137 Ambivalence228? Just because this place has good German beer doesn't make it Happiness137 Ambivalence228. I ended up in Leipzig.”

Patty looked up, “What do you know about German beer? When have you been to Leipzig?”

“Twenty minutes ago, and when I was thirty-seven.”

“Fine. Whatever. Sorry.”

“Is that another
vapor-paper
? Didn't we cover all of that in the preliminary forms?”

“This is the real thing, Harold. It's the GT-14675 Sep-Prep: Separation Preparation.”

“What are those first four pages for?”

She flashed a wearied expression. “That's our identification numbers.”

“You wrote down both our identification numbers by hand? At 2,500 numbers each, that's—”

“Yes, and I doubled checked them. They must really want to discourage people from filling these things out.” Patty closed the form. “Harold, I think this divorce is the right thing to do. But, I didn't cheat on you.”

“What?”

“I was scared. I felt trapped. I felt like it was the only way you would listen.”

Harold rubbed his hands over his forehead and cheeks. “It's not that I expect you to lie, but somehow I'm not really surprised. I didn't think you would do that to us. What are you afraid of?”

“I'm afraid of forever. But I'm more afraid of us being together forever. When we were alive, the idea of it seemed sweet and romantic but now the reality of it is horrifying.”

“I know,” Harold said. “I feel the same way. But aren't we soulmates? Isn't that what soulmates are supposed to do? Live together, forever.”

“How do we know if we're soulmates? If we're wrong and we spend forever together, that's a pretty big waste; isn't it? And what are we going to be like at the end of forever? We have to change, right?”

“The end of forever?”

“You know. Will we be monsters? Will we still love? Will love have any meaning at all?”

“I think C.S. Lewis wrote something about the goal of the afterlife being the creation of these miniature gods similar to God.”

“I don't want to be a miniature god. I want a little house and another first child and a crappy job with a stupid boss and stupid friends and chocolate.”

“Well I'm not too thrilled about meeting this Deus ex Machina Machine.”

“What? What's that?”

“God. You know, solver of impossible problems.”

“That's not His name,” Patty said. “That's a nickname. Who told you to call Him that?”

“Sammy.”

“What? Sammy the ATM Machine?” She smirked. “Harold, this is important. We need to do this right. If you needed money for a lawyer you could have asked. You know I took three million with me. That's our account. Our money. We earned it together.”

“It didn't feel right.”

“Harold, we have to make a decision one way or the other. I've filled out this
vapor-paper
. It allows us to do a trial run—to see what the separation will be like. It lets us split up the major ideas that define our life together. But even the major ideas have a bunch of minor ideas that get tangled up and mixed in. I put in our numbers and the form fills most of itself out. We just have to assign a few major ideas to either you or me as a trial run. Our houses were pretty major so I gave you the house in Georgia and I took the one on Third Street. Here,” She moved the form toward him. “The first few pages describe it better. It describes how they get around the problem of vagueness when splitting up ideas between two people.