The Apocalypse Reader (21 page)

MY WIFE STOPS and smiles at me.

"I love you," she says.

I fidget a bit and say, "You're a great lady."

"You're fucking kidding me."

"What?"

"Who am I, Eleanor fucking Roosevelt?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Just ... drop it." She pushes past me out the door.

I feel like confessing. Not so much about my infidelity as about being privy to the coming Apocalypse. Petra seems to have worked out the mechanics of it. I feel fairly certain that I'll play a significant role in future events; Petra and I.

"Let's drive into town," I say, "I'll buy you something."

She glowers, my wife. "I'm mad at you."

"Sorry, you caught me off guard, that's all."

"Do you know how lame that sounds?"

I think about how lame that sounds. Then I think of something else and something else again. Pretty soon I'm thinking of Petra. She said that the goal of consciousness is to discover what isn't.

I drive.

My wife stares at me.

"What?" I say.

"I'm talking to you. Are you just going to ignore me?"

"No," I say and look out my driver's side window through the trees at the booming sun. "Is the sun getting bigger, do you think?"

"What?"

"Careful. Shrill factor." I hitch up my shoulders.

She punches me in the chest. "Let me out."

I pull to the curb. There's a park across the street. As she gets out of the car she bumps her head and curses furiously.

I leave my coat in the car, but take my hat and gloves, a truly ridiculous figure.

"Where are you going?" I say, putting on my hat.

She walks towards the shops.

"I was only kidding. Come on, baby." I pull on my gloves.

She stops, turns to face me with her hand stuck to her head, like a teapot. She looks woozy. I feel oddly attracted to her.

"Honey, come back," I say.

She sees me, softens just a bit, then says, "You parked like fifty feet from the curb, asshole."

I ASKED PETRA who'll survive the coming apocalypse.

"Eye of the needle," she said.

I HEAD FOR the park. All the benches are empty of people, just as the sky is empty of birds. I ask myself the question: What am I not?

A plane glides by.

There's Petra, expanding and projecting her likeness across the skies. I start blurting out numbers in sequence as if they'll protect me. There's a dark spot, in the meat of the sun, where her heart would be. Then I see its shadow spilling, spreading forth, and feel the true weight of it, as a torrent of blood comes crashing through the trees.

THE END

Josip Novakovich

ALTHOUGH DANIEL MARKOVICH got exile status in the States on the grounds of religious persecution in Yugoslavia, after several years of living in Cleveland he no longer went to church, and many years later he quit reading the Bible. This is how it happened, from the beginning to the end.

He came to the States in 1968 when Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia; he had believed that the next stop on the Soviet world tour would be Yugoslavia. While Czechs were streaming into the States, he couldn't claim the Soviet threat in Yugoslavia as grounds for being a refugee.

But his claims of religious persecution were not false.

Daniel had wanted to be a geography teacher in Daruvar, Northern Croatia. In the interview, he answered the question, "Do you believe in God?" affirmatively. The frog-eyed principal, a boar hunter-there were still some boars alive at the time in the Papuk and Psunj Mountains-said, "Of course, you can't teach if you're intoxicated with the opiate of the masses. How can you teach the principles of the dialectical materialism if your head is filled with ghosts?"

"I understand the principles perfectly well."

"But you don't believe them."

"God and dialectical materialism are not at odds with each other."

"How about evolution?"

"According to the Bible, God created man last, and according to the theory of evolution, man is one of the last mammals to evolve. The two are in harmony."

"Where is God? Show him to me. See, you can't. You're superstitious."

"I can't show you a neutron either, and you take the scientists' word for granted, don't you? I often do. As for the opiate of the masses," Daniel said, "what is the bottle of
slivovitz
doing on your table?"

The school principal threw him out, and no matter where Daniel applied for a teaching position, he didn't get it-and he suspected that it had to do with his being a Croat as much as with his never denying his belief in God. For a couple of years before getting to the States, he worked for a living as a house painter and mason. He grew to be big-fisted and muscular; and with his broadchested frame, dark red beard and long red hair, from a distance he looked like a big torch. He got married, to a student of accounting, Mira, a pale freckled blonde with large dark brown eyes.

They immigrated to the States, in Cleveland, Ohio, and Mira gave birth to a daughter and then to a son. At first Daniel spent a lot of time preaching in Croatian in a Protestant church whose congregation was Croatian and Serbian, and instead of learning English, he studied Greek, because he needed to understand Christ in the original New Testament language more than he needed to understand Walter Cronkite, although he listened to Cronkite too, vaguely understanding him.

Soon, however, the church in Cleveland had grown large enough to employ a full-time minister, who'd just immigrated from Serbia. Daniel didn't like being the second fiddle to an inexperienced youngster, who was getting overpaid for doing what should be the labor of love. The services were now conducted in Serbian. Daniel went to church no more than once a month.

Daniel worked as a mason and house painter. Americans, of course, had no use for geography, so his chances of landing a job in that field were even slimmer in Ohio than in Yugoslavia. Daniel was not happy with his physical labor. All nature travails, he quoted, to console himself, and considered it unavoidable to suffer. Even Saint Paul worked-made and repaired fishing equipment-for a living; labor was a genuinely apostolic thing to do. Daniel chiseled stones and fitted them together into garden walls on several estates in Shaker Heights-those were good and well-paying jobs except that little glassy stone shards had hit and damaged his right eye. He stripped old lead paint on many houses and painted with new lead-based paint. The noxious fumes gave him dizzying headaches. He joked that labor was the opiate of the masses. By the time Sunday came, he'd be bleary-eyed, like someone who had been drinking brandy all week long. After a couple of years of working like this, he went to church once every two months. In the evenings he fell asleep with the Greek New Testament in his hands or sliding out of his hands onto the floor, where one day his dalmatian, whom he'd forgotten to feed, ate it-chewed the whole Gospel, and the Book of Revelations and the Psalms to boot. From now on, he called his dog Saint Dalmatian. Daniel got another Greek New Testament, and continued his practice of dozing off with abstruse verses made even more abstruse and sanctimonious by the ancient tongue.

Daniel didn't like Cleveland winters with icy winds blowing from Lake Erie, so he moved with his family south, to Cincinnati, where there weren't many Croats, and even fewer Croatian Baptists, but that no longer mattered to him. He carried the Gospel in his heart, a portable cathedral, with two atriums and two dark Holy of Holies that were constantly washed in his own blood.

"Let's go to Florida if you want heat," suggested Mira.

"That would be too steamy. Besides, a hurricane might lift our house and drop it in the ocean. Or one of those rockets, if it failed in its takeoff, might fall on our house and burn it to the ground. NASA is the new Tower of Babel, I tell you. God will mix them all up, if Americans and the Chinese start working together: Not only will they lose the common languages, they'll also lose the common math that helps them blast the rockets."

"You are crazy," Mira said. "That's one likable thing about you."

"Why go anywhere else? It's hot enough in Cincinnati," Daniel said. "With you around." Mira, although she was forty, still had outstanding breasts and supple thighs, large and resilient, and when children weren't around, Daniel stroked her, and they frequently made love, wherever they happened to be when lust took hold of them.

They bought a cheap house in Northside, painted the bricks all red, as was the fashion in Cincinnati.

Even after a dozen years of being in the States, Daniel hadn't learned English; he was still improving his Greek. He worked too much, and grew ill. He got scorching pains from his kidneys down the urethra, and when he could no longer take it, he went to the hospital. He had a painful intervention, the old-fashioned way. But what pained him even more, once he recovered, was the bill for $5,000.

He had no insurance neither did Mira, who worked as a checkout cashier in Woolworth's. Daniel paid the bill because he wanted to be a lawabiding citizen and good Christian. But now he needed to work even more, to the point of his biological limits. Why did God's punishment of Adam-
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread
-affect him so much, while many other people never seemed to work; they drank bourbon while making transactions?

He no longer had time for Greek, let alone English, and only rarely did he read the New Testament in Croatian. That pained him, but he thought that he shouldn't be selfish and work toward his own sainthood; God should understand that he needed to give his son and his daughter a chance to prosper. And once they were off to college, he'd study the Bible more assiduously than ever before.

Marina, already sixteen, was an "A" student, but lately she had been restless; she got a driver's license and wanted to go out and have pizza with her friends all the time. She worried him. He'd sometimes take a look at her; she was a full-figured woman, who wore tight skirts. Looking at her womanly body, he felt uncomfortable, as though it was sinful to notice his daughter, and to resolve his discomfort, he shouted at her that she should wear longer skirts, and threatened to beat her if she walked out like that, nearly naked.

"Dad, if you beat me, I'll have you arrested for child abuse."

"You are no longer a child. You paint your lips scarlet like a harlot."

"Dad, what do you know about harlots?" she asked, pouting her full red lips. "They don't exist in this country, do they?"

He didn't answer but looked at her sadly. She was brazen, and he resented that. What a country, where you have no means to discipline your child, but where without discipline a girl could perish, be gobbled up by frolicking and drug-crazed mobs.

When she turned seventeen, she eloped with a law student who attended the same church as the rest of the family. Mira blamed it on Daniel's strictness. "If you'd been more lenient, they could have dated for a while, she could have brought him home, we could have gotten to know him. You should be happy anyway. I know him from the church; she made a catch, I'd say."

"How can we be a family if we run away from each other? Is that the American way?" To his mind, they were all, except him, Americans now. They spoke English among themselves, and his kids, from what he could tell, had no accent in English.