Christmas Trees & Monkeys (20 page)

Lying face down on the dock, Nicole splayed her fingers wide. Her legs dangled in the water but the rest of her body pressed against the wood. She tried to breathe. The world pulled at her from every conceivable direction, but something held her in place. She felt the water reach past her knees like a monster under the bed, grabbing her. Then the water raced away. Her legs shot out behind, desperate to follow. She remained pressed against the boards, gulping air into her compressed lungs. She hadn’t noticed Bernard Myers racing away in the retreating water.

* * *

No sound traveled into space. Earth in its tremendous majesty hung somewhere within the deep silence. Its perpetual rotation was a constant, unnoticed against the backdrop of infinity. Also unnoticed was the sudden interruption in this rotation.

Like a child’s toy on a string, the blue and white planet stopped spinning. It remained motionless for only a moment. As Nicole struggled for breath against the dock and Bernard Myers released his empty glass into the lake, the massive planet began its rotation once more, in the opposite direction.

* * *

Slowly, the pressure holding everyone to the pavement subsided. As it did, Battery Park was filled with the sound of hundreds of people heaving gasps of air into their lungs. Jack grabbed the railing. An inner joy verging on ecstasy spun in his mind, more than the vertigo that had seized them all.
God is truth
, he thought.
His word is truth and He has delivered unto us His promise
.

He wiped his eyes so he could see God’s destruction clearly. Across the water, the Statue of Liberty was not a crumbling pile of metal and stone. It held its stained torch to the sky. Jack rubbed his eyes again. Something was happening. The screams of those behind him were overpowered by the roaring of the churning bay. Waves smashed into others crashing upon the eroded shore of Liberty Island. Jack raised his arms.

“
Behold,” he shouted, “God’s final—” Then he stopped. Like a leashed dog watching his master’s car drive away Jack watched the waters of New York Bay smash and roar away from him in a reverse flood. The ferries with their screaming passengers were swept away, as if a plug had been pulled from some massive drain far out to sea. Jack fell against the railing, his mind confused by the sight. Miles away the bay surged with a momentum built over millions of years, up the shores then completely over Staten Island.

Along the milky horizon, the Atlantic Ocean moved like a fading gray wall eastward, then was gone.

Someone struck him on the shoulder. Jack did not turn around. People grabbed his arms and hands; some with violence, others pleading.

“
You son of a bitch,” a man’s voice spat. “What did you do?”

“
Please, it’s not too late, I know it isn’t. Please touch me and bless me.”

Jack did not listen to their words. He stared across the glistening canyon of mud. He whispered to the lost sea. “Come back. Please come back to me.”

“
Turn around, you coward.”

“
Forgive me, father....”

“
Make it stop. Make it stop, please make it stop.”

Jack’s grip on the railing fell away. Pulled and guided and shoved into the throng of his self-proclaimed parish, he floated away on their hands and arms. He stared past the bobbing heads, into the sky. In a sea of a hundred faces that twisted and writhed into their own distinct emotion, Jack never felt more alone.

* * *

When she was able, Margaret gathered Robin and Katie back into to her arms. “Come here. Stay close,” she said. She could not hear her own words. Behind, what had begun a few seconds earlier as a low rumbling intensified in volume. The ramp still led up to the ark from the grass. Carl was slowly pulling himself up with the railing.

Margaret shouted louder with every word. “Drop the ramp, Carl. Do it now.” Wind blew with a panicked force against her back. Twisting along with it, or perhaps pushing it along, the roaring din sounded like a freight train storming out of control towards them.

Carl knelt by the bolts holding the ramp in place. He looked at Margaret. Again she yelled, “Drop it Carl, for God’s sake....” Her words were lost in the wind.

Katie cringed, more at her mother’s tone than words. The situation became all too clear in her mind. Instead of standing and running up the ramp like she wanted to do, she wrapped her arms around Margaret’s neck. It was then that she saw what was coming towards them.

Carl looked nervously around the perimeter of the boat. In blind unison, the spectators converged on the ark. Carl’s gaze fell to Margaret’s face. Her panicked expression shook him loose from his stupor. From the west, something massive was filling the sky. He saw but did not think about it. He pulled the bolts. The ramp fell with a thud onto the grass.

The mob slammed against the hull. Men in suits tried to scale the greased sides, only to slip and fall onto three others waiting below. The woman with the sandwiches raised one of her children towards the deck. There was no one there to lift him up.

Carl slammed the bulkhead and bolted it with one motion. He jumped the last three steps and stopped. In the sunlight streaming through the gaps in the hull, he made out the young woman whom Margaret had sent up the ramp. She wandered with her baby among the confused gazes of the passengers, shouting something he could not hear over the mind-rattling roar of the approaching water. He pushed her towards Margaret’s vacant spot in the middle of the boat. Without any other thought but the routine they had all rehearsed a hundred times prior, he tied her arms and legs against beam. At first she would not release the child, but with as much delicacy as possible Carl wrenched young Connor from her and secured him as best he could in the harness originally slotted for Robin. The baby squirmed and cried. Carl felt his own chest heaving with sobs he couldn’t hear. The entire boat shook. Whatever it was would hit them in seconds. He tried to pull the baby free and though the harness bounced and stretched, it did not release its grip. It would have to do.

The outside daylight faded. Carl looked across the floor to where his harness hung empty. He wasn’t going to make it.

The sound, reflected in the screaming face of her oldest daughter, was the sound of surf magnified a million times. Katie gripped her neck so tightly Margaret gasped for breath. On her lap, Robin’s mouth moved calmly in song. Margaret wished she could hear it. She stared at the child’s lips and watched her sing to the wind.

Behind the fire station a wall of uncountable leagues of salt water rose from the western horizon. The sun reflected off its face in immense ribbons of swirling color. Ahead of it all came the wind like a trumpeting angel, and the deafening sound of a thousand million high tides rolling towards shore but never cresting.

As Carl ran for his harness and Margaret stared transfixed at her baby’s song, a shadow passed over the common. Then, like so many chess pieces, the trees and buildings and people were swept away.

* * *

Arms flailing wildly, Carl hovered in the middle of the ark as it rolled over and around him. The darkness was nearly complete, except for the occasional shadow whirling overhead. He could make out voices. Some were screams but others were calm, directed to children and pets alike as everyone hollered or barked or mewed in terror. Carl felt as if he’d been tossed into a madman’s carnival ride. He expected to be deluged in water, but felt nothing but an icy wind tearing through the gaps in the hull.

He sensed the beam before he actually hit it, a dark foreboding shape rising from the gloom below. He raised his left arm. When they connected, it was the arm that gave way. A bright flash filled his vision. His body went limp and rolled away from the beam in time with the tumbling of the ship. He landed on someone’s chest. Two heavy fists gathered him up by the tee-shirt and pulled him close. His legs tumbling behind him, Carl reached for his left arm. Something hard and jagged protruded just above the elbow. Touching it sent a vibration coursing through his body. He realized what he held between his fingers was a jagged edge of bone. Feeling on his face the hot breath of whoever held him, he passed out.

* * *

Gravity pulled at the heaving surge of water as if to reclaim a lost toy. By the time the ocean reached the Rocky Mountains it was no more than a mile higher than the tallest peak. As the wave rolled across the mountains its underbelly tore open. The wave crested. Miles of sea, rock and ice curved in on itself and fell to earth, like a giant on a toppling beanstalk.

* * *

Bernard Myers stared at the sky. Clouds raced by, stretched thin by the wind. Though nothing seemed to be pinning him down, he could move neither his legs nor his arms. The house he’d glimpsed before the lake cast him down was gone. Shattered beams and even a bathtub rose in his peripheral vision. He wondered if the wooden stake protruding from some numb area of his lower body was once part of the same house. He also wondered if his back was broken.

From his vantage, Bernard could see the Rocky Mountains to the west. They rose high over the trees that once blocked his view. A blurred gray bank of clouds rose quickly over the snow-capped peaks. It spread north and south as far as his paralyzed gaze could see.
So the final storm approaches
, he mused. Thunder rolled steady and unending over him.

The rising cloud bank draped over the mountains. Bernard watched brilliant streaks of white rip into the gray blanket. What he had originally took for thunder intensified, then he understood. The cloudburst everyone had waited for was come and gone. The flood waters left in their wake advanced with a speed Bernard could not begin to measure.

God, I’m sorry for every bad thing I did. I’ve never been to confession, as you probably know, but... oh hell
. He sighed. Air gurgled in his lungs.
Forget about me. Take care of Aggie. Please. She can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes, but she’s a good woman
. He watched with resigned dispassion the approaching monster.

* * *

Agnes stumbled across the yard, fumbling with her lighter. When she finally ignited the cigarette on the ninth try the smoke burst from her mouth only to be whisked across the empty lake. Fueled by the nicotine she ran towards the cottage shouting, “Bernie? Bernie?” No one paid her any heed. They gazed through their own fearful stupor at the lake or the sky or each other.

Sanjiv stood at the edge of the grass, one foot tentatively on the dock. He stared down its length to Nicole, who hung awkwardly from the edge. The ground shook in chorus with the baleful roar approaching from behind. He bit his tongue to keep the growing hysteria from showing in his face. He felt betrayed, but could not understand why. Somehow all of this, foretold in her god-forsaken premonitions, seemed to be Nicole’s fault. She was making this happen.

He never believed in God, no more now than when Nicole first started her religious ravings. Wrapped up in the sound and wind Sanjiv wanted to believe in God and heaven and hell more than he remembered wanting anything before. He began walking towards her. It was then, in the last five seconds of his life Sanjiv knew what he had to do. Kill the woman and stop the madness.

Nicole watched Sanjiv watching her. She wondered if he noticed the vomit on her shirt. Her husband’s face twitched with an effort to appear emotionless. She’d seen him do this so many times before. Now, though, a thin line of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. Sanjiv’s eyes never wavered from hers. Nicole’s hands ached. She now slipped past the edge of the wood, keeping her head above the dock as if treading water. The mud at the bottom of the pier sucked at her ankles.

“
I’m sorry,” she said. Like Agnes’ smoke, Nicole’s voice tore away behind her. Sanjiv must have seen her lips move for he spoke as well. She was grateful not to hear him. He reached the end of the dock.

Reflexively Nicole released her grip. She sank to her knees, wondering if she would go right on sinking, falling away from the man leaning over her. The trees, cottage and earth holding them all in place erupted. Sanjiv never looked back. The world seemed suspended in that final moment as he leaned further and reached towards his wife. The destruction whirled behind him in a quickly descending backdrop. Then the Pacific Ocean slammed them all into oblivion.

* * *

The first crest rolled over the Rocky Mountain valleys. In a mad game of leap frog the next wave tumbled over the malay. Torn between gravity and momentum it found its mark sixty miles further east. In this manner the water moved from town to town and state to state. Each cresting wave surged lower than its predecessor until the sea, its initial enthusiasm spent, rolled slowly across the Plains. It settled miles deep, then less, then simply spread as a level of rising salt water that broke and fell back against the first significant obstacle in its path.

At its furthest point, just east of the Mississippi River, the flood became a playground for children who understood little its source. They danced in the salty puddles; scooped mud into red plastic buckets. Trembling on porches their mothers and fathers stared westward and wondered why they had been spared. They sat in folding chairs and watched increasing numbers of pale green helicopters thumping with an angry urgency towards the distant western hills.