What in God's Name: A Novel (3 page)

Craig shook his head. “They’re self-erasing. As soon as you wake up, you forget almost everything that happened.”

“Is that sort of like…?”

Craig nodded. “It’s sort of like what happens when you die. You remember a couple things—a face or two, maybe, or a place. Then it fades.”

She stirred her coffee and took a sip.

“Sometimes I think I remember something,” she said. “Someone calling my name. I think it was Susan, maybe? Or Sarah? I don’t know.”

“The only thing I can remember,” Craig said, “is working right here.”

Eliza nodded. She could recall orientation so vividly: the endless PowerPoint presentations, the idiotic trust falls, the ’80s-themed mixer. But everything before that was a blur.

“What’s your favorite beta program?” she asked.

Craig bit into his Hostess cupcake.

“It’d have to be Vision Stuffer,” he said. “That’s the one that allows you to visit them. You know, to try to reason with them.”

“Does that ever work?”

Craig laughed. “Nah. They usually forget what you told them by morning. And if anything sticks—like an image or a word—they fill in the blanks themselves and write a crazy book about you.”

“So all of those religions…”

Craig nodded. “They’re our fault.”

He broke his second cupcake in half and slid a piece over to Eliza. She shook her head politely, but within a few seconds she was eating it.

“Thanks,” she said. “I forgot to eat dinner.”

“Me too. That’s why I picked strawberry—it seemed like the healthiest cupcake flavor.”

Eliza raised her eyebrows teasingly. “Plus you’re allergic to chocolate.”

Craig averted his eyes. “What were we talking about?”

Eliza smiled. “Heaven stuff.”

“Right!” Craig said, relieved to be back on the subject of work. “Do you have any other questions?”

“Just one. How does he decide? You know, on who gets in?”

“I don’t know,” Craig admitted. “I’ve always wanted to ask him. But I’ve never had the guts.”

“I’d love to know.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

She yawned suddenly, clasping her hands high above her head. Craig tried not to stare as her shirt climbed slowly up her midriff, revealing a sliver of her stomach. She almost definitely had a boyfriend. Some executive probably, with tailored suits and monogrammed ties. His name was probably James or Charles or…

“Craig?”

“What?”

“You were staring off into space.”

“Oh—sorry. Just tired.”

She leaned in slightly. “Thanks for showing me the ropes. I really appreciate it.”

“Sure!” Craig said. “I mean, it’s my job.”

She finished her coffee in a single swallow and left him alone in the break room.

Craig’s breath was shallow, and his heart was racing—but when he returned to his cubicle and turned on his computer, a sense of calm enveloped him. A thirty-four-year-old in Amsterdam needed to bike through traffic in time to feed his daughter’s gerbil. This he understood—this he could handle.

In the last three years Craig had gone on exactly one date. He didn’t have much of a frame of reference, but he could tell the encounter had gone poorly. His first mistake, he realized in hindsight, was to insist that the girl meet him in the office cafeteria. He was just a Sub-Angel back then, in Snowflake Design, and he’d been too anxious to leave his cubicle for more than thirty minutes at a time.

He couldn’t decide whether or not the girl was pretty, in part because he was too shy to look directly at her. But she seemed like a nice person, and the following week he worked up the courage to call her again.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said. “You’re just too work-obsessed for me.”

“What?” Craig asked. He was designing a snowflake at the time and wasn’t fully listening to her.

“You’re too
work-obsessed,
” she repeated.

“Oh,” he said.

Craig knew his obsession with work was unusual, but he couldn’t control it. His job was his entire identity. Craig, like all his coworkers, lived on the Heaven Campus, a sprawling enclave of dormitories, office buildings, and snack bars. His home was only five minutes away from his office—less if he scootered to work. It was convenient but also vaguely depressing. Heaven was so vast, yet his entire life took place within a single square acre of it.

Craig didn’t have to be an Angel. Most people in heaven were content to work as Pages or secretaries, sleepwalking through their term of service until it was time to retire. God required forty years of work, but it didn’t matter which job you picked. Most Heaven Inc. employees spent less than five hours a day in the office. The campus had everything: tennis courts, bocce, a koi pond. It was crazy to spend all your time indoors.

But whenever Craig signed up for a golf lesson or rented a rowboat, he felt ridiculous. There were a lot of fun things to do in heaven. But none were as thrilling as what you could do on Earth.

There were so many things in Craig’s life that he couldn’t control: his carpal tunnel symptoms, his mounting insomnia, his nonexistent social life. But he could control the humans. He could grant them small victories, divert their little tragedies, deliver them some tiny measures of happiness. He knew it was madness to spend so much time obsessing over them. They had no idea he even existed. His miracles were invisible by design—and always would be. Still, on some level, he felt like the species was counting on him. And he didn’t want to let them down.

Sometimes, when he needed cheering up, he watched clips of children celebrating all the snow days he had caused. One girl, an eighth-grade outcast from Sweden, was so thrilled when she heard that school was canceled that she immediately started break-dancing. Her moves were so infectious that Craig stood up in his cubicle and danced along with her, shaking his hips and pumping his fists in the air. It was the happiest moment of his career.

He knew his miracles were small and often ridiculous. But he loved every single one of them. It was only when he turned off his computer and took the lonely elevator ride down that he sometimes wondered: Did the humans really need him? Or was it the other way around?

Eliza watched as the night janitor put on his coat and lumbered out of the office. It was seven in the morning. She’d spent all night on a father-son fishing trip in Arkansas, trying in vain to hook them some bass. She’d scrutinized the chapter on Current Manipulation, but most of it had gone right over her head.

How did Craig make the job look so easy? She knew it was inappropriate, but she’d peeked at his computer after he’d gone home. He’d already completed several miracles this week, and all of them were pretty cool.

In Portugal he broke a Ben and Jerry’s freezer, compelling the manager to give away his melting ice cream for free.

In Melbourne he rigged an old man’s iPod to play the Beatles’ song “Birthday”  over and over again until he remembered to buy his wife a gift.

In Oxford he anticipated that an elderly professor was about to refer to his only black student, Charles, as “Jamal.” He quickly short-circuited the fire alarm, emptying the classroom just in time.

He loosened a piñata for a puny third-grader in Puebla, shocking the boy’s peers and transforming him into a cult hero.

He made thirteen shooting stars, eleven rainbows, and a hundred and forty breezes.

And she couldn’t even hook a single fish.

She squinted at her pasty reflection in the computer monitor. She had to pace herself. She was less than a week into the job, and she already resembled that pathetic cliché—the scraggly, burnt-out Angel. She leaned back in her chair, and her spine cracked audibly, a series of disturbing pops. She would give the miracle one more try and then she’d give up on it.

“Come on, you stupid fish…”

She paused. Something was wrong.

“What the fuck?”

Her computer started to beep as a line of text flashed nightmarishly on the screen.

She checked Craig’s cubicle, but he hadn’t shown up yet. No one had; she was the only person on the floor. She rummaged through her desk, knocking over several half-filled coffee cups before she found the manual. It was an enormous book, the size of a hatbox, with tiny type and pages so thin they were translucent.

“Code Black, Code Black…”

It took her five minutes to find it and another ten to accept the reality of the situation.

She scanned the office one more time, but it was still completely empty. She thought about waiting for Craig to arrive, but the code kept flashing insistently, the beeping getting faster with every passing second.

Eventually, she stood up and sprinted toward the elevators.

“You can’t see him right now,” Vince said, kicking his feet onto his desk. “He’s busy.”

“But I have a Code Black. A possible tsunami!”

“You can make an appointment,” Vince suggested. “But there’s a two-month wait.”

“I can’t wait two months!”

“I don’t know what to tell you, honey.”

Eliza’s vision was blurry from exhaustion, but she thought she could detect a smirk on the Archangel’s face.

“Fuck this,” she muttered.

Vince laughed incredulously as Eliza shoved open the brass door.

“Page! Where are you going?”

“I’m an Angel,” she corrected. “And I’m going to talk to God.”

God liked eggs in the morning. It didn’t really matter which kind. Poached, fried, scrambled. Sometimes he had them bring him what he called a bird’s nest: a piece of toast with an egg stuck in the middle.

He removed the silver dome with a flourish. Scrambled. Perfect.

God looked at his watch and smiled proudly. This was the third morning in a row he’d gotten to work on time. If he did two more, he’d tie his record. He flipped on the television and switched it to NASCAR.

A reporter was interviewing Trevor Bayne about his recent winning streak.

“I just want to thank God,” he was saying. “I wouldn’t be where I am without him.”

God shook his head and laughed. He loved that Bayne guy.

He was almost finished with his eggs when the race began. He grabbed the remote and cranked up the volume.

“Come on, Bayne,” he said, shaking salt onto his eggs.
“Focus.”

There was a soft knock on his door. He’d asked for Tabasco. Maybe this was it?

“Come on in,” he called out cheerfully.

A young woman he’d never seen before came into the room. She was very attractive, he noticed, but haggard-looking. Her bright blue eyes were barely visible beneath drooping lids. And her long, thin body was stooped like an old man’s. God shook his head. He could never understand it when a pretty young woman worked hard.

“You bring the Tabasco?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Tabasco?”

“No…uh…I’m here to tell you about a Code Black? The computer said I should warn you.”

God nodded. Bayne’s lead had shrunk by more than half. How had that happened?

“I’m sorry for interrupting,” Eliza said. “But it said there was a potential loss of life.”

God motioned for her to take a seat and turned up the volume on his television.

“You like racing?” he asked. “This is a big one—Bayne’s going for his second straight win at Daytona.”

Eliza nodded awkwardly. “If you’re not too busy,” she said, “I think you should take a look at the tsunami. It seems like a pretty urgent situation.”

“Move, Bayne! Finish strong! I’m sorry, what?”

“It seems like an urgent situation.”

God nodded. “You’re right. I’ll intervene.”

Eliza exhaled with relief. “Thank you.”

God opened his e-mail account and tapped out a message to Vince, typing with two outstretched index fingers. Then he leaned back in his chair, grabbed the remote, and turned up the television as loud as it would go.

“Bayne and Collins are neck and neck!”
the announcer shouted.
“Collins is making a push…a big push! He’s three lengths ahead…he should win this one easily and…oh, no! He’s down! His car has flipped end over end! He’s escaped the wreckage, but he’s on fire…wow…he really seems to be in a lot of pain. Looks like Trevor Bayne is the winner. Although I’m sure he didn’t want to win like this.”

God chuckled.

“Sir,” Eliza said. “When you said you were going to intervene…were you talking about the car race or the tsunami?”

God made eye contact with her for the first time. “What tsunami?”

Something on the TV caught his eye. “Hey—they’re interviewing Bayne!”

The racer lifted a trophy over his head and leaned toward a cluster of microphones. “I just want to thank God for this victory,” he began. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

God clapped his hands. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what he just said?”

Eliza forced a smile. “Yeah. Neat.”

“Man…I
love
that Bayne guy.”

God turned off the television.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry. Where’s the earthquake?”

“It’s a tsunami. And I’m not sure where it is—it just said ‘possible.’ It came in this morning, around seven?”

God stroked his chin. “Probably too late to stop it. I tell you what: I’ll inform my prophet.”

He turned the television back on and flipped to a new channel. A wiry man in rags stood by the side of a highway, holding a cardboard sign.

Eliza squinted incredulously at the screen. “That’s your prophet?”

God nodded. “I’ll tell him to warn the people with a sign. Something blunt, like ‘The End Is Near.’”

Eliza stared at the screen. The filthy man waved at her.

“God,” she whispered, “with all due respect…couldn’t you have picked a better prophet?”

God shrugged. “What’s wrong with Raoul?”

“I just feel like if you sent your messages through a scientist, say, or a president, more people would pay attention.”

“I’ve been giving Raoul the straight dope since he was seventeen. If the humans don’t want to listen to him, that’s their problem.”