Margaret's Ark (2 page)

She flipped the eggs onto her own plate and sat at the table across from the girls. When she a child, the Catholic rule of not eating an hour before Communion was still in effect, at least in her house. Whether that regulation had ever been lifted, or modified to apply only to swimming she didn’t know. Margaret never took it seriously in her adult life. Robin squirmed enough in the pews without being hungry on top of it.

“Eat up,” she said, noticing Katie's attention pulled further into the Sunday comics and away from her cooling breakfast.

*     *     *

Jack used to have a last name, Rory, or Lowry - something like that. Like everything else that
came before
, he could never be certain. That life had been taken away, ripped from his arms, replaced with this new existence of mental fog and occasional blades of pain. Not physical pain, though his stomach did have moments when it felt as if a hole opened inside him when he didn’t eat enough. The blades were memory, flashes of remembrance. They hurt to look at, like staring too long into the sun.

Jack lay sideways on the cot. The pillow was so thin he had to curl his arm beneath it for support. The wall in front of him was blemished – stains and spit and other unnamable excretions Rick and his people – including Jack when his shift came around – worked unceasingly to erase but which had an existence beyond anything manageable, like memory, coming back again and again in spite of the scrubbing.

He’d had a thought a moment ago, but it had flittered away like a kite loosed in the wind. Jack lay still, reaching mentally for the string and trying hard to hold it. Something about God. The face of God. The face of an angel.

The angel in his dream. Faceless, glowing with light. Telling him something important. A message from God Himself, maybe. He stared at the wall, not seeing it, letting images race past like on a movie screen. Water. Ocean. No, not quite. A lot of water, though. Floods.
The
Flood? Like Noah.

He was close, but the kite kept spinning out of reach. Jack laid his hand on a clean spot on the wall, hoping to grab it. The motion only served to bring him further into the waking world. It was lost.

After a time, he rolled over and swung his legs off the bed. His blanket was bunched on the floor again. It never stayed on him very long when he slept. He reached down, saw significance in its curves and folds.
Angel
, he remembered again. Telling him something important. He wished he could remember.
God is in the details
, someone told him long ago, in that other life. A life which Jack understood with a rare bit of clarity he could never get back. He was
too
lost. Everyone was. That was the point of the dream. Everyone lost, doomed to.... something or other.

The second floor was partitioned into two small rooms, one for men, one for women. His area was abuzz with the waking sounds of the night’s residents. Few people spoke, at least to each other. Grumblings, coughing out last night’s nicotine. One man in the far corner heaved and vomited behind his cot.
Didn’t have a good night, that guy
, he thought. These sounds served as morning’s wake-up call along with the smell and plate-clanking of breakfast downstairs. He followed a group of a half dozen men already merging with a larger group of women and young children in the outside hall. It was dark here, thick with body smells, lit by morning light through a window over the stairwell and a single, dust-caked bulb.

Jack kept his gaze down, not wanting to be drawn into conversation. He had trouble keeping the threads of his life together, and things got worse when someone made him focus on whatever struck
them
as interesting. There was a second set of feet descending the steps beside him. Jeans, clean sneakers, a scarred black hand.

“Sleep well?” the man asked. Jack looked up, ready to look away again if the other tried to make eye contact. It was a young face, midnight black and mapped with scars of some long-ago battle. Probably some accident, or a bad fight. He looked familiar, and seemed to know Jack enough to keep his gaze directed away, to the back of a bald man’s head in front of them. They stepped onto the ground floor landing where their procession joined the already-long line queued up for breakfast.

“OK, I guess,” Jack finally said.

The young man nodded.

The bald guy turned around. His fleshy face folded in on itself, half-confused, half-irritated. He said, “You talking to me, Mister?”

Jack shook his head, tilted his head to the right. “To my friend, here.”

The fleshy head turned to...
Michael
, Jack remembered.
The kid’s name is Michael...
and snorted. Jack couldn’t tell what the sound meant, but was glad that the head turned back around and the man stepped up to close the gap in the line.

Jack blinked. Was he supposed to have gotten up early today for table duty? Maybe it was tomorrow. Rick would have come up to get him if it was today. The center’s director was serving and chatting with the guests, his gray beard glistening in the steam rising from the metal food trays. Rick would let him know if it was his turn. Jack was hungry. He was pretty sure he’d eaten supper last night. Short term memory problems, someone explained once. Might have been Rick, or some doctor. Problems “retaining information” since...

Jack shook off a sudden chill and waited his turn

“Morning, Jack,” Rick said when he’d made it to the front of the line.

Jack looked up. “Hi, Rick. Did I forget to...” He held the tray with one hand and waved the other out towards the floor.

“Nope, you have dinner duty tonight.”

Jack smiled. A couple of his yellow teeth had begun to blacken. Rick made a mental note to talk to him – again – about having them checked when Doctor Allen came around next week. “Good,” Jack said. “That’s good. I’ll be here. Just, well...”

“I’ll remind you.”

Jack couldn’t find Michael anywhere. Wait – there he was, waving him over to the far end of a table where two empty seats faced each other. Somehow, he already had his food. Rick waited until Jack turned back around before loading up his tray.

 “You all right, Jack?”

“Yea, sorry.” He moved on, let the woman with the big curly hair put a plastic glass of orange juice on his plate, then found Michael again.

They sat and ate in silence. When Jack looked up, the guy’s tray was empty.

“Jack,” he said, looking directly at him. Jack found himself returning the stare. Michael’s eyes were clear white, no red from drinking or lack of sleep. Eyes full of peace, so much that they overflowed, filled his own body. He thought of his dream again. Michael had been in it. He was remembering.

“That’s good,” Michael said, smiling. “Now,” he reached out, laid a hand over Jack’s, the one holding the fork, which now began bouncing up and down. More than calm flowed through him from this young man with the dark face and clear eyes. Also love, understanding. Michael said, “Remember.”

Jack remembered, then closed his eyes and tried to forget again. Too much, the dream, his mission; he wasn’t worthy. Michael, standing with him on a long-forgotten plot of grass, outside a home he knew once but no longer. Telling him the Terrible Truth of what was to come. Jack was lost in its massive presence. Lost, but not without a place in God's world. Jack had been chosen to lead his people to salvation before it was too late. There was something else... an ark - of the Covenant perhaps? It was probably just talk like they do in churches. Holy Speak.

Michael’s hand squeezed his. The Flood was coming. A really bad one, a new Great Flood and Jack understood his responsibility was to come forth from the desert and prepare the way for Judgment.

“Not judgment,” Michael whispered. “Salvation.”

But Jack did not hear. There was too much strength coming from God, through and out of the young man across the table. Too much power. He was Jack the Baptist. But he wouldn’t use water for this new consecration. That was reserved for God alone.
No!
What was he thinking? He needed to get a grip; the world was sliding away again. He would cover the people with words. His Words. Jack's words. God's words.

“Jack?”

Rick was standing where Michael had been a moment ago, the chair pulled out. The shelter’s director laid both hands flat on the table and leaned toward him. “Jack, you okay?”

Jack stared at the man, then past him, looking for the angel. Where was Michael? Something important was slipping away, washed clean by his Mission. He tried to regain it, but it was lost. All he had left was what he had to do, from now until he died in the waters with his new congregation.
I need to focus; I need –
 he would never again lose what was said to him in his dream, his vision. At least the overall idea of it.
God is in the details
, he thought again, but details were too small to hold. He had to... preach. It was too important. He needed to get to work, reach His people.

“Jack, come on, let’s –”

He got to his feet, walked towards the front doors, past the line of hungry lost souls for whom this was just another day but for whom there would be so few days left. Rick was calling him from far away in that other world Jack had finally lost forever. Now he had nothing, squinting in the bright Spring morning, trying to form the words he must speak until the world died.

They would come. The words. He was in God's graces now.

58

It was the same dream. That's what Margaret thought, at first. The night was cool,  the damp, sweaty months not yet upon them. She walked in her backyard with David. Tree shadows swayed around them, moving of their own volition. No,
she
was moving, gliding over the grass. David held her left hand in his right. The touch was light, a breeze among the breezes. They passed through a fence. Then a house.

Leave me alone
, a child whispered in his dream;
I don
- and they moved past, through more houses, more trees, more fences.

Lavish town common, labeled as such by the original founders who had settled here from the east coast in the mid-1800s. An extensive, triangular plot of land in the town center, the common was bordered on one side by Lavish’s municipal buildings, police and fire departments, town hall. The communal property hosted outdoor concerts and an annual Christmas tree lighting. At this late hour, the roads intersecting the town center were abandoned. As well they should be, she supposed, considering none of this was real. Just a dream. She and David walked now, still not speaking, along one of the paved walkways interspersed web-like across the angular lawn. The sky in the east was a pale pink. The sun would be rising soon. To the west, deep purple, almost black, defying the onset of morning.

She stared at the steady red light mounted in front of the fire department's familiar brick facade. In an upstairs window, a man stood, backlit by a single lamp. He stared out over the square. Margaret recognized Marty Santos. Not by the fire chief’s face, obscured in shadow, but by his silhouette. Short, wide-shouldered. What was he doing up, and in her dream?

Silence in the world, like before; only the feel of the wind against her skin, the angel's touch on her hand. David stopped in the center of the largest plot of grass.

“Build it here,” he said.

His voice was soft, but its presence among so much
quiet
startled her. She knew what “it” was. Last night's dream remained crystalline in her memory, especially now.

“An ark?” she said, hoping the question didn't convey too much skepticism.

“Yes.”

Margaret felt a little foolish asking the next question, considering none of this was real. “
Ark
as in
boat
, I assume, not what God commissioned Moses to build....?”

David smiled, a soft, patient expression. “Yes, as in boat, to carry your family and twenty-seven others above the flood.”

So much dramatics in this silent dream. The breeze ruffled her nightgown a little harder, irritating her with its softness.

“I can't build a boat of
any
kind. I've never been good with wood. And I'm too busy to start - “

“There will be others, if you begin soon to tell them His message.”

“You mean God's.” She said it as a statement, not a question, her tone harsher.

David took a few steps away, eyes to the grass, looking for flaws, perhaps in his choice of location. He did not look up as he said, “Yes. God’s. Yours and mine. The God of Abraham and the Apostles. Of Muhammad and Elijah. The God of believers and of atheists. Even those of great faith, a faith in the unknown, which you and your family have demonstrated so often, will sometimes need proof. These dreams, and those experienced by thousands of others, will be a sign for you to believe and obey. The days are slipping away from you, but faith in such things as this first sign might take time. In the meantime, I'm here to teach you.”

The wind tugged at Margaret's gown. She said nothing, assuming anything this person had to say would be said in his own time. She wanted to wake up. The last dream didn’t end well, and judging by the way the breeze was picking up, this one wasn't going to, either. She tried to turn, look up at the fire station and pull some moral support from Marty's outline.

As was natural in dreams gone sour, Margaret couldn’t move her feet.

“Let me go.” She had to shout over the wind.

“Behold,” David said, then doubled over as if in pain. He landed on the grass and his body split apart. It happened quickly, in seconds, but the details played themselves out in dreamlike clarity. His ribs became long, straight planks, tearing forth from his chest. More wood grew like branches from shoulders and hips. Some widened into sheets of plywood, flipping into the air to arrange themselves in haphazard order. The angel's skull cracked apart. More wood poured forth. In seconds, David was gone and the mystical construction was complete. The boat – the
ark
–  looked awkward and ugly, standing in the space where once there was only grass. She saw every detail. Every nail, how many boards, every length and width down to how many square feet externally and internally. Not in
cubits
but yards, square feet... she felt the wood beneath her fingers, though she remained rooted to the grass. The smell was heavy, acrid. A chemical, greasy odor. The ship shimmered from an unfelt heat.