Author: Cody Goodfellow
Date: 2021-05-25 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Speculative; Fiction; Absurdist; Satire; Humorous; General
Description: “Goodfellow delivers a highly entertaining weird fiction tale situated at the intersection of punk rock and religious philosophy. […] This slim, punchy volume can be read in one go, but readers will find it worth multiple readings to unpack the sheer volume of its theological insight. Unruly, funny, and wildly original, this rebel’s take on the quirks, pitfalls, and ironies of religious devotion sings.” —Publishers Weekly Gala Murowski wasn’t really looking for God when she joined her local nunnery, but when an ecstatic out-of-body experience sets her spinning through a godless cosmos, she bec

Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing

Cibolo, Texas

The Flying None

Copyright © 2021 Cody Goodfellow

Illustrations © 2021 Betty Rocksteady

All Rights Reserved

The story included in this publication is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.PerpetualPublishing.com

Cover Art by Matthew Revert

ALSO BY CODY GOODFELLOW

Gridlocked

The Man Who Escaped This Story & Other Stories

Scum Of The Earth

Unamerica

Sleazeland

The Snake Handler (w/ J. David Osborne)

Rapture Of The Deep & Other Lovecraftian Tales

Repo Shark

All-Monster Action

Spore (w/ John Skipp)

Jake's Wake (w/ John Skipp)

Perfect Union

Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars

Ravenous Dusk

Radiant Dawn

For Gretta, and everyone who’s had enough of thoughts and prayers.

. . . the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.

—Thomas Carlyle,

On Heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History

1

As she always did before making a big life change, on the gray April Monday morning that she was to enter the convent, Gala Murowski stopped at the Texaco station in San Anselmo to call a random person in Ireland and ask for advice.

It was the last working payphone in all of Marin County. A kid she hung out with in high school showed her how it was broken so you could make free international phone calls.

Pretty cool, sure, but long after the novelty of getting high and crank-calling Lagos or Tel Aviv as a kind of global magic 8-ball had worn off, she would go alone and call residences in Ireland, because she liked their accents and the kind working-class folk on the other end would patiently listen to her problems and offer sincere advice while eating Kraft mac and cheese with corned beef and waiting for someone to return from the pub.

She was sure Maeve in Belfast or Noreen in Cork would give her the lilting push she needed to go through with it, but this time, nobody picked up. She’d run to the end of the short list in her journal of friendly numbers and was about to try making some up when she noticed the old woman waiting to use the phone.

She was a prime specimen of the wide-eyed boomer demographic that ran this town— hypersensitive ex-hippie widows who still thought karma was invented by John Lennon.

Gala hid her face and tried to pretend she was putting her call through, but her mind was trapped in a loop of guilt at her snap judgment and resentment at being made to feel guilty. The old woman came closer, wafting tea rose perfume in her face. “Oh dear, you’re crying, what’s the matter?”

Gala hung up the phone and stepped back. “You go ahead, I’ll wait . . . ”

“I couldn’t push you aside, sweetheart. You clearly have something on your mind. If you can’t reach your person, why don’t you tell me what the trouble is?”

Gala almost bolted for her car, but she forced herself to take a deep, cleansing breath and stand her ground. She had a right to be here, she had a right to be. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, if the phone company wanted to let people make free international calls, that was their business, and why was this lady picking on her, anyway? But the woman was still smiling indulgently, just like Rhiannon in Galway would as she steeped her tea and helped Gala detangle her Gordian knot of problems—not like her real mother, who only humored you to trap you later.

The old woman offered her a dainty embroidered handkerchief. Blowing her nose into it, Gala said, “Thank you . . . So like . . . I was going to try to become a nun today, but like, I don’t really believe in God? It sounds stupid when I say it . . . But in like superhero origin stories, the protagonist is always like, record-scratch, exactly the opposite, and then boom! Plot twist!

“I’m not explaining this very well, am I? My last boyfriend was into comics, but he was an idiot . . . I need real answers. I already volunteer at the library, and I do research for my mom’s books, she writes new age bullshit about angels, you probably have a couple of them at home, no offense, but they’re total delusional garbage . . . I still think religion is like that telephone game, where you whisper something in someone’s ear and it goes around in a circle and comes back all garbled . . . but like, I see these signs sometimes, and I know it’s like a defect in our sensory processing to look for patterns in random phenomena, right? But the world is going to shit and maybe something really is out there, trying to make me see there is a purpose and I could be a part of it, if I could just go somewhere quiet and open my heart to it. Sorry this isn’t coming out right, I sound like a total asshole thinking she’s Joan of Arc because she got her first period, but . . . should I do it?”

By the end of her tirade, Gala was shaking with snotty tears and fully expected the old woman to call the cops on her or just vanish in a puff of smoke. Instead, she threw out her arms and pulled Gala close in a hug that somehow came close to filling in for all the maternal affection and support she’d missed in her life.

“It sounds like you have deep unresolved issues with your mother that are clouding your judgment, hon. But if the worst thing you’re thinking of doing is retreating somewhere to meditate and find yourself, you’re doing good. Remember. All mortal things will fail you. People too. Relax, sweetheart, you’ve got this . . . ”

Gala hugged the old woman until she’d got hold of herself. Wiping tears off her face and apologizing for slobbering all over the old woman’s shoulder and ruining her handkerchief, she thanked her profusely and ran to her car and drove directly to the convent.

Artists have varied greatly in their depiction of this fateful moment, with even the most literal interpretations incorporating subtle or garish religious symbolism to infer divine providence guiding Gala’s decision on that ordinary spring day, even portraying the kindly old woman as a seraphic process server delivering a holy subpoena, or as a bewildering extra-dimensional contraption with wheels within wheels and garlands of blazing eyes and commanding hands, and Gala convulsing ecstatically among the cigarette butts and bottle-caps of the parking lot tarmac like a latter-day St. Teresa. Some borderline heretical depictions, such as the controversial fresco in the Galatine basilica of Corte Madera, go so far as to surround the figure of Saint Gala with a halo of howling disembodied souls so thickly that they obscure her face as a foreshadowing of all those who would suffer and die as a result of her decision to pursue a life of quiet spiritual contemplation.

2

Naturally, the internal debate that sent Gala to the Texaco payphone was more complex than she’d represented it to the nice old lady. There were some things that even Gala couldn’t just tell a stranger.

Though she believed in nothing, Gala was genetically hardwired as a spiritual seeker. Against her will, she was still caught up in the whole God thing. Grandma Loretta was a staunch Catholic and constantly nagged Gala and her mother about catechism, conformation, and all that scary indoctrination shit, against which her mother fought tooth and nail.

Mom didn’t believe in vaccinations or the food pyramid and routinely left young Gala in her car seat in the Volvo when she went shopping or barhopping, but she at least spared Gala the attentions of the Church, while lavishing credit for everything good that happened on guardian angels. Gala had come to see organized religion as a Ouija board on which the faithful haphazardly steer the planchette around according to their own selfish desires, and calling whatever nonsense message it spells out the word of the Lord.

When she got her own email address in middle school, Gala began to get spam from her grandmother in the form of chain e-mails commanding the recipients to pray synchronously in order to achieve some immediate real-world goal. That God could be so out of touch that he required people shouting in unison to get his attention was a huge red flag, but even more so because they usually wanted some abortion-loving politician or Supreme Court justice to die before the next election, which told her all she really needed to know. Mom shared her outrage over the chain-letters and cut Grandma Loretta out of their lives, but still forced Gala to dress up pretty and put on a sad face for her funeral.

Any lingering doubts she’d had were laid to rest when she read Paradise Lost in high school. That she was also coming down off her first and last acid trip only drove home the utterly depraved horror of the whole grand spectacle when God, watching Satan descend to Earth to work the corruption and downfall of humankind, tips his hand to Jesus, of all fucking people, about exactly how it will all go down, right up to Christ’s crucifixion, betraying that He is either just another cog in a miserable machine, or an abominable cosmic sadist.

And here she was, moving in with Him.

What she couldn’t say that the old woman seemed to understand when she took her into that fateful hug was that she couldn’t know that she wasn’t just acting out the twin imperatives in her defective genetic programming—the spiritual stirring and the need to reject her mother, and all her fell works, just as her mother had done, before her.

Much as she hated to admit it, Gala could not make decisions without reflexively acting out against her mother’s influence, and thus hopelessly yoked to it. Her mother’s obsessions and grudges were a dark star that slingshotted Gala into eccentric orbits of manic doubt and catatonic conviction, never letting her plot her own course.

To make matters worse, Gala’s mother was the celebrated Angel Lady of Marin, author of three USA Today bestsellers about angels that all but divorced them from Christian doctrine and basically turned them into Caucasian genies or fairy godmothers.

The boat she’d lived on in Sausalito since her third divorce was an angel museum, the ancient oxblood Volvo she’d passed on to Gala still encrusted with fatuous woo-woo bumpersticker sophistry—NEVER DRIVE FASTER THAN YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL CAN FLY, THIS CAR IS SURROUNDED BY LIGHT, et cetera—and a vanity license plate that proclaimed her ANGLDY. (Until she could afford to switch it back to a regular plate, Gala flirted with rechristening herself the Angle Lady, and covered the bumperstickers with compasses and protractors.)

Gala could never be sure that her headstrong skepticism wasn’t just a response to her mother’s fixation on heavenly saviors, and in spite of the signs, she couldn’t be any more certain that her newfound spiritual stirrings weren’t the first steps towards becoming what she hated most.

She had to be more than the sum of her programming, but how could she know, when half the program was a mystery?

All she could remember of her father was a god-haunted, sad bastard who taught her that “Goddamnit” was a magic word, because he never managed to complete even the simplest task without exploding in profanity. Even in her most expansive, chardonnay-soaked moods, Mom refused to elaborate on this incomplete picture, beyond simpering that he thought he was an artist, but should’ve been a priest.

Mom and Dad met as members of the Breatharians, a lifestyle cult that preached that all physical food was poison, and that one could derive a balanced diet from “mindful respiration” and inhalation of proprietary essential oils and fragrances.

Mom had worked her way pretty far into the program, living on bottled water, multivitamins and whiffs of anise and mugwort for six months while pregnant with Gala, until she caught the head Breatharian coming out of an Arby’s with Horsey Sauce spattered all over his pearl-buttoned western dress shirt. Mom and Dad split up soon thereafter, and Dad drifted out of her life before Gala could walk.

So it was in her blood; so what? Not that recognizing the trap had set her free; she’d like to see the person who, genetically cursed with Rachel Murowski’s tightly wound nervous system and perversely dyspeptic intellect, could forget her traumatic upbringing and go her own way.

And then there were the signs.

In compiling grist for one of her mother’s puff-piece articles (16 Secrets Of Highly Holy People—Take Our Secret Sainthood Survey!), she’d learned that many saints, sadhus and gurus were said not to decay after death, and even to emit a sweet, spicy post-mortem perfume. Soon after, Gala began to notice her own burgeoning natural smell. Her B-O contained notes of cinnamon, cardamom and apple blossoms. Whenever she sat still in one place, ants gathered and crawled all over her; random guys came up and asked her if she’d been baking something, usually followed by a crude double entendre; and woodland creatures came into her room like in Snow White, though they didn’t so much team up to adorably clean the place as wreck everything, shit everywhere and eat her food.

Some people endlessly proclaim they’re not of this world, and some have otherworldliness thrust upon them. Gala had just enough experience with the snares of this world—sex, gaming, drinking, drugs—to know that she had little aptitude for, and derived no enjoyment from, any of them. Beer made her sleepy, weed made her manic, she sucked at everything except Tetris, and she’d only ever successfully orgasmed once, alone, in the bathtub, and she’d nearly drowned.

In spite of her best efforts to be of this world, it clearly didn’t share her commitment. Her body was less reliable than her old, crappy car. Machines broke down at her touch, relationships never worked out, and no fewer than three places of employment burned to the ground between the time of her initial interview and her first scheduled day of work.

She volunteered at the library and was terrified they’d try to pay her, because the Fire, the timeless, semi-sentient force of entropy that had consumed the Library of Alexandria and London in 1666 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki would come for the Marin Civic Center, too.

All too often when she was lost in some repetitive task—shelving books at the library, drawing or coloring or cleaning while listening to music—the world disappeared as if a veil was lifted and she was surrounded by light, and she felt like how that guy in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave when they led him out into true sunlight for the first time, except she came to a moment later no more enlightened than before, and sometimes she peed herself.

Mom was sure she must be epileptic, but Gala was equally sure her condition was arcane and unique, perhaps someday to be named after her. But a battery of EEG’s, MRI’s and whatever failed to disclose any abnormality. The doctor suggested she must just be really susceptible to autohypnosis, and then hit on her mom.

With everything she’d seen of God, Gala had to agree with Richard Francis Burton, who observed that man had only ever been worshipping himself; and yet, she could not escape the nagging sense that the real thing was out there, whispering to her in a voice she could only hear if she turned out every other sound in the world.

3

As nunneries go, Saint Candy’s seemed like a pretty sweet set-up.

It was not an accredited Catholic institution, any more than Saint Candy was a recognized canonical saint. Candace Scofield was the black sheep of a Marin lumber clan who suffered a nervous breakdown amid a family fight over her father’s estate in the late 1970s, rebuked her privilege and vanished from the public eye to live in a lean-to in the woods surrounding UC Santa Cruz, basically cosplaying a Medieval hermit, fasting, praying, and growing herbs.

A harmless eccentric in a community that doted on such weirdos, Sister Candy became a local legend when she intervened in a sexual assault on the campus, pelting the assailant with rocks and carrying the victim on her back to the campus medical center, only to be fatally struck by an ambulance.

When the martyred nun was identified as the missing heiress, the surviving Scofields rallied for another litigative grave-robbery, but Candy’s will prevailed, pledging her untold millions to the creation of a shelter for stray and feral cats that was also a non-denominational retreat for women of any religious background to pursue a life of quiet contemplation and service to a horde of stray and feral cats.

Mother Mildred, the prioress? Nunnerist?—called it a “spiritual pot luck,” but at least it looked like a proper convent, with a chapel, a huge kitchen, vegetable and herb gardens, and half a dozen spartan cells in a cloistered courtyard. Far from the freeway and any commercial airline flight paths, it was as quiet as she could have hoped for. The cats had the run of the place, contemplating themselves and serving none.

Saint Candy’s imposed no dress code, no formal vows and no spiritual indoctrination beyond the informal “share sessions” the sisters put on after each meal. As Mother Mildred explained the rules, or lack thereof, Gala, who’d done a ton of research on Hildegard von Bingen and torrented Agnes Of God, Black Narcissus, The Devils and the entire Sister Act franchise, found herself a little dismayed at the lack of rigor in the mise en scene.

Even as she stressed the commitment to banning any technology that didn’t exist five hundred years ago, Mildred had to shout over the sound of someone running a leaf-blower in the courtyard.

A fucking leaf-blower! Hildegard would’ve burned these people at the stake.

After showing her around the (non-vegan!) kitchen, the gardens, the chapel and the common area, she ushered Gala into the cloister. All the other “girls” were enjoying quiet time, though she distinctly heard irritating folk music leaking out of one cell and what sounded like someone whipping themselves with a leather belt from another.

Her cell was just like a college dorm room, with a firm single bed, a simple desk and chair, a mini-fridge and a shelf with a random assortment of weathered paperbacks—Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Life Of Pi (proving a long-held unscientific opinion of Gala’s that if you stacked any random books long enough, eventually one or more would turn into copies of Life of Pi or Eat Pray Love), and (proving that if there ever was a God, She was dead) a copy of All Your Angels: A Field Guide, by her mother.

Mildred plumped down on Gala’s bed and crossed her legs. The braying whine of the leaf-blower seemed to stalk them like all the bees in the world looking for their stolen honey. She cleared her throat and shouted like she was trying to win a hog-calling contest. “I THINK WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT SOMETHING. IF YOU’RE JUST LOOKING FOR A NICE PLACE TO COMMIT SUICIDE . . . ”

Naturally, the leaf-blower cut out just as she got to the embarrassing part. In the next cell, someone loudly giggled. “What I’m saying is, if you’re in emotional distress, you should seek counseling. We’re not equipped—”

To Gala’s explosive, “What the fuck . . . ?” Mother Mildred shrugged and tilted her chin at Gala’s wrists. Gala crossed her arms, but they had to cross this bridge sooner or later. “I’m not suicidal. I used to cut sometimes as a coping mechanism for anxiety. Don’t nuns flagellate themselves and all kinds of stuff, to ward off incubi, or something?”

“Well, that’s different. But I hope you understand that we, as a group, don’t condone self-mortification—”

“So if God does it to us . . . like stigmata or something . . . like if He puts literal magical bleeding holes in you, go to the head of the class, but if you’re just managing a lifetime of trauma the only way you can, you’re a problem, and you gotta go. I know I’ve only been a bride of Christ for like a minute, but it sounds like He kinda gaslights us a lot, you know?”

“We’re not judgmental here and we welcome honest debate, but we get dragged into that kind of rhetorical briar-patch.” Mother Mildred steepled her fingers, knitting her brow and shaking her head, as if she was praying for the strength to figure Gala out.

“Okay, but like . . . and I’m just trying to establish what the ground rules are, and you said there weren’t any, which is very punk-rock, don’t get me wrong, but it sounds like there kinda are, like, a lot of ’em. Rules, I mean.”

Waving her scarred wrist with a theatrical flourish, she ticked them off on her fingers. “You won’t accept people with serious emotional trauma, but who enters a convent, if they’re not retreating from something? You don’t accept the possibility of miracles, and you discourage spiritual debate. Feel free to jump in any time, if I’m leaving any out . . . ”

Mother Mildred sat as if posing for a portrait, long enough for Gala to notice that she had a natty little mustache, which she’d bleached. Maybe plucking it would constitute self-mortification. Finally, she said, “I hope you’ll find a way to be happy here,” reminded her that dinner commenced at 6PM and left her to get settled in.

Gala plugged in her earbuds and blasted Gregorian doom-metal while unpacking her suitcase with the broken zipper and thinking about giving herself stigmata to see if Mother Mildred kicked her out. She put up a few tattered movie posters (Destroy All Monsters, The H-Man, The X From Outer Space) over her bed with Scotch tape and watched them slowly slough off the rough-hewn stone walls like scabs from a scar.

A text blast from Mildred interrupted her reverie like someone was trying to bleep out the Latin swear-words in the music. NOISE COMPLAINT: 1st notice.

Wtf! Using earbuds, she replied.

Can still hear your anachronistic music, Mildred shot back. Neighbors very disturbed. Please turn down or off? Thx.

Anachronistic? Seriously? Its devotional music composed on Pope Gregory’s scale + performed on Medieval acoustic instruments + r we rly arguing about what’s anachronistic via text msg?

NOISE COMPLAINT: 2nd notice, came the reply.

At dinner, she met her fellow brides of Christ. Her heart leapt up into her throat and then subsided into the acid-bath of her stomach as she recognized all of them.

Galadriel was a cashier at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Books at Larkspur Landing, and as good a reason as any to swear off patronizing that store for life. Gala was named, so her mother told her, for Salvador Dali’s wife, who by all accounts was a tyrannical, pretentious skank, but it flattered her absent father’s artistic pretensions, so Gala could be sympathetic to someone named for an elf in a fantasy novel, if their names weren’t so maddeningly similar, and if she wasn’t such a bitch.

In a flowing white gown with a garland of day-lilies in her hair, Galadriel was taking very seriously the Renaissance Faire number her parents had done on her, and proudly declared herself the convent’s resident witch, silently adding with an aggressive flutter of her Stalin-mustache eyebrows that she’d defend her title as zealously as she’d defended the local bookshop against browsers with outside coffee beverages.

Next to Galadriel sat a prematurely gray-haired woman in weird black robes, chewing her nails more vigorously than her dinner. Magda was introduced as a leading scholar of Gnosticism, and Gala recognized her as the crazy lady who chanted, burned incense and occasionally got naked at the San Rafael farmers’ market.

Wanda, in a faded gray sweater of knitted cat hair, might’ve been Magda’s twin sister. Gala knew her unsettling thousand-yard stare from the Wall of Shame at the library.

Wanda was the evangelical kook who drew clothes on the pictures of nudes in the art books, blacked out the swears and ripped out the sex scenes in all the novels, and drove around town in a van covered with pictures of third-trimester abortions.

She didn’t seem to adhere to any religious doctrine beyond condemning every part of the body between the ankles and the shoulders, though the local rumor-mill had it that she slept with a stolen CPR practice dummy for company. She mostly kept to herself unless someone else was having fun, and let all the feral cats sleep in her room.

Maryelizabeth was the only one who seemed to take this whole nun thing seriously. In a spotless white habit with a winged head-thing, she might’ve been cosplaying Vanessa Redgrave in The Devils. She seemed like a serious, straight Roman Catholic, and the only lingering mystery about her was why she couldn’t find a berth in a legitimate nunnery, instead of this booby-hatch.

As it was Maryelizabeth’s turn to cook dinner (a bland but hearty vegetable soup and corn bread with honey), she offered a special thanks for their newest member, then invited her to give the blessing.

Gala looked around for a moment, cleared her throat and mumbled, “Dear Lord, please let this obligatory expression of gratitude free us from guilt for the suffering and exploitation of the natural world and human labor that gave us this meal.”

“So . . . you’re an intellectual,” Galadriel put in, the same way she might point out a rabbit with its leg in a trap.

They ate in blessed silence. When they were done, they started the freeform sharing session, which was their word for arguing. Gala would’ve loved to take part in a serious theological debate, but the arguments seemed to revolve around the chore assignments, garden planting, dietary shit like whether it was possible to ethically steal honey from bees, and whether or not they should get premium cable TV. Gala scoffed at the last question, which seemed to unify the whole room against her. “I mean, if we’re here to renounce the outside world, maybe we don’t need TV?”

“I’m not chipping in for anything that supports that upright copulation stuff,” Wanda snipped.

“She means Dancing with the Stars,” Maryelizabeth explained.

“All things of this world are shit and snares of the Demiurge,” grumbled Magda, “so you might as well enjoy them.”

“In what meaningful way have you renounced the world, dear?” Galadriel sniffed, reaching across the table and touching Gala’s hand like she was healing a leper.

“Well,” Gala fumbled, “I’m here . . . and uh . . . I deleted my Facebook profile—”

“Social media is the devil’s day-care,” Wanda declared.

“I know, right?” Gala said. “Like, I don’t even know when people type ‘LOL’ after a bad joke, are they telling you they laughed at their own bad joke, or ordering you to laugh at it . . . ?”

“So what are you,” Magda purred, “a Satanist? When Mildred said someone was moving in, we were hoping for a Satanist. It’d add vibrance to the conversation. Isn’t that right, Wanda?”

“I’m not living under a roof with a dark-sided sister,” Wanda said, reflexively drawing a protective pentacle around her place-setting, which didn’t stop a feral cat from coming over to lap soup from her bowl.

“Actually,” Gala said, “I’m kind of an agnostic . . . ? But I thought I’d give God one last chance to make His case . . . ”

“But what do you believe?” Magda demanded.

“Well if I could just pick out my God like at a Build-A-Bear Workshop, I’d want the one in this little picture book my mother used to read to me, about how God is in every flower, every sunset, every skinned knee and broken balloon. I thought that was really beautiful and I looked at the world as this father-mother who loved their creation so much that they inhabited it. I used to ask God’s permission before I picked a flower. Then Sunday school told me he was this pissed-off incel way up on a cloud, silently judging everything you do, and I kind of checked out . . . ”

“Splendid,” Galadriel said. “We have our first Spinozan animist.”

The fractious group had finally found true sisterhood in unanimously laughing at her. Gala asked to be excused.

Splayed out on her bed with her earbuds in, Gala wrestled with the thorny question of whether or not she’d made a mistake. It would be no hardship to go back to her job at the library and her bachelor flat in San Rafael, reactivate her profiles and tell the world what a crackpot snake-pit this place was . . . but she’d be repeating the destructive Green Gargantua pattern of her life, clinging to the self-imposed hell of the Everlasting No when she had been so sure only yesterday that this was, if not the path to the Everlasting Yes, at least the purgatorial Center of Indifference that would impel her, sooner or later, to some measure of harmony, if not true enlightenment.

Was that too much to ask?

Of what happened next, not even Gala could say afterward, what was true and what was fancy. She was quite certain, however, of two things. She did not simply fall asleep and dream it all, and she did not touch herself.

Focus on breath, filling and feeding your body. Be your breath, flowing out into the universe. She never could stick with it for thinking of the transcendental yoga sessions in the park with Guru Gary, or his tight OP shorts that allowed his ball-sac to loll in plain view like a hairy snail when he sat criss-cross-applesauce. Or how close Gary came to being her stepdad.

This time, perhaps the music and the urge to escape this place, and the anxiety about her new direction in life and the superabundance of nutmeg in the soup all combined to lull her into a deep hypnotic trance.

She felt a quickening tingle between her legs and an alien wetness welling up in her hand. When she held it up in front of her face, blood dripped in her eye from a hole in her palm. Her eyes widened in horror as she stared into the hole and saw another eye looking back at her from the stigma.

Gala let out a scream so loud, she seemed to tumble right out of her own mouth.

The cracks in the ceiling, at which she’d been staring for some unmeasured span of time, drew closer with alarming speed. Thinking the ceiling was collapsing on her, she tried to roll off the bed, but executing this maneuver only made her more fearful. Looking down, she saw her gawky, Olive Oyl body still sprawled across the narrow bed.

Even more alarming, her legs were kicking, her hands snarled in the sheets, spasmodically clutching fistfuls of cheap floral-print fabric, her breath coming in panting gasps. If she didn’t know better, she’d think her body was experiencing an orgasm.

Figures that it’d happen the moment she left.

4

Gala tried to swim back into her body but she battled a river of marmalade, its sluggish current too thick to resist.

It lifted her through the tiled roof of the convent, over the hills of San Anselmo and the Tiburon Strait, Sausalito and Angel Island. She broke through the misty canopy rolling down from Mount Tamalpais to swaddle all of Marin County, and climbed until the whole Bay lay far beneath her, a lukewarm cauldron of fog. Higher still she rose, soaring over plateaus and spires of clouds, tumbling into the stars.

She recalled the first time she flew in an airplane, how awestruck she was by the cloudscape, a magnificent world unto itself, somehow more solid and real than the land below. When the plane sliced through the clouds to skim over them under the naked sun, she remembered thinking this must be the Heaven that her mother made such a big deal about, and she searched for angels and harp-strumming souls in white robes.

She asked her mother where were they? And her mother told her that she couldn’t see them because they were all underneath the plane, carrying it to its destination.

She flew so high above the clouds that they were but a layer of shaving cream on the face of the earth. Far beyond the faintest wisp of atmosphere, she reveled in the perfect silence of the vacuum. The world dwindled to a finite globe and then a pale blue pixel and she flew faster rocketing into the perfect black of the void.

The sun crowned the silhouette of the Earth in spears of light, but soon it and all the outer planets were just twinkling motes in her wake. She stormed the center of the galaxy, diving into a cluster of nebulae dripping with newborn stars, thinking surely, if He was anywhere, it would be here. But she found only more dumb clods of mindless matter. No throne of creation, no gigantic workshop, not even a lousy fucking flying saucer.

She could go deeper, into the center of the universe itself, but she knew she could search until her body wasted away in a hospital bed without finding any sign of the Almighty. And even if she discovered that all the galaxies were merely atoms and molecules composing a crumb in His beard, what would that prove? The universe was as empty of engaged prime movers as she’d always suspected, and even less interesting.

She might as well go home . . .

And no sooner had she voiced this thought in whatever she was using for a brain at the moment, than she was falling through stars and planets and unfathomable gulfs of emptiness, plummeting like a bungee-jumper snapped back by the elastic band of her ego, downwards into the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way, to her solar system, her planet, her continent—

But not her body.

She found herself, or at least her living ghost, in a little chapel with beautiful rosy cedar paneling, gold fixtures and a big electroplated cross backlit with psychedelic LED lighting that cycled through a rainbow of two million colors, bathing a handsome older gentleman kneeling before it in a lush raw silk bathrobe and monogrammed satin boxer shorts. He stared so fixedly into her “eyes” that Gala was sure he could see her. As the sound of his lips moving grew louder, she imagined he was praying to her.

Lord, he said, I know you been real good to me and I am sorely grateful, and as your humble servant, I have hearkened to your signs and portents, seen your hand at work in lifting up our ministry, helping us spread your word. And you’ve been more than generous, so I humbly ask that if I’m doing wrong, just give me a sign . . .

Gala floated in place, impaled on the feverishly blinking chrome cross. She kind of recognized the man praying to her from TV. He was the guy on the news whenever there was a disaster, telling America who God was angry at this week, and why He did what He did. On his own show—which was on BET, which was weird, because he was whiter than Twinkie filling—he was always speaking in tongues, casting out demons and demanding money.

At last, the evangelist got off his knees, raised his hands in the air and said Amen. He turned and opened the door to the tiny closet-sized chapel, opening on a grand state room in what must be a motherfucker of a huge yacht, decked out like a Turkish seraglio.

As big as the state room was—bigger than Mom’s entire houseboat—nearly all of it was taken up with a bed, where lay a boy and a girl, and neither was old enough to have a favorite band, let alone to be part of some redneck Taliban harem. “Thank you Jesus,” said the evangelist, and moved to shut the door.

Gross.

It was like googling “Holy Grail” and accidentally clicking on 2girlsonecup.com. And what brought her here? To leave her body and search the universe in vain for any sign of God, and then to find herself witnessing this . . . this. But perhaps it was not her search, but the evangelist’s prayer that summoned and bound her to this cross. Perhaps there was a divine providence at work here, after all.

You want a sign, asshole? I’ll give you a sign—

The door had just slammed shut in its custom-carpentered frame when Gala flexed her will as forcefully as if her own body were nailed to the cross. Though it had no bones, muscles, joints or nerves, the ghastly neon crucifix stirred and tipped from the shelf upon which it was enshrined. The thud of its weight on the deck resounded through the yacht.

The evangelist, now stripped of his robe, well-tanned belly swinging pendulously between his bandy legs, tried to cover the waning boner projecting out the flap of his silk boxers.

Gala beamed all her righteous wrath at him, but it passed right through him like smoke through cheesecloth. Billowing across the stateroom, she clawed at anything she could take hold of to make herself heard, and found herself looking out the eyes of the underage girl.

She pulled the sheets up over her naked body and screamed at the top of her lungs, “For shame, you mendacious sack of simoniac worm shit! Woe unto you, thou cradle-robbing vermin, that taketh my name in vain!”

The evangelist jumped on the bed and planted his hand over her mouth, but she bit him and screamed even louder.

“What part of ‘sell what you possess and give to the poor’ did you take to mean, ‘Buy a yacht to fuck kids on’? How many little old ladies gave you their social security check and told you they were praying for your boner? You think I drop hurricanes and school shootings on the regular because of gay marriage, but I’m cool with this shit? You feculent cockwomble, what part of thou shalt not diddle little kids did you not underfuckingstand?”

The double doors flew open. Two men in tactical duck-hunting gear stomped in with assault rifles and swept the room with red laser beams. The evangelist jumped off the bed and tried to push them out of the stateroom, but more people crowded in, including an older man in pajamas and his toupee on backwards.

The man with the rug seemed extraordinarily concerned with the other man’s welfare, but when he saw the boy and the girl in the bed, his whole demeanor changed, and he began demanding an explanation from both the evangelist and his grandchildren.

The evangelist was just launching into the sermon of a lifetime to defend his actions, when one of the tactical guys knocked his teeth down his throat with the butt of his rifle. Gala willed her eyes to close, wished herself away and, mercifully, got her wish.

Gala came to her senses falling out of bed. She landed hard on one butt-cheek on the cold concrete floor of her cell. Someone was pounding on the door and her phone was blowing up. Bleary and light-headed and pretty sure she’d peed herself a little, she grabbed her phone and looked at the endless parade of messages.

NOISE COMPLAINT: 3rd notice

NOISE COMPLAINT: 4th notice

NOISE COMPLAINT: 5th notice . . .

5

The next morning, Gala awoke with fleabites all over her legs and an abiding sense of euphoric bliss. She’d slept well, which was almost unthinkable in a strange place, and more, she’d dreamed so many things . . . She tried to recollect them, but it was like trying to hold a spiderweb. She ended up with indistinct strands of gossamer trash, but her usual deep-seated anxiety was sated by whatever brain-movies she’d played for it last night, and for a while at least, she was free to do and be without it roaring at her.

She rolled out of bed, noticing a distressing stain on the sheets . . . Holy shit, did she wet the bed? Was it sex dreams? She’d never, to her knowledge, actually had a wet dream, but she couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed last night. Some golden irony right there, body, she thought, patting herself on the back.

Plenty of sex nightmares, though. In one recurring puberty dream, she was taking a shower after PE with all the other girls, feeling ashamed of her awkward body, when hordes of spiders and cockroaches came boiling up out of the drain.

She was frozen and couldn’t run away as they raced up her legs and took refuge inside her. She could only scream and try to cover herself as her infested body swelled and bulged with hateful bovine breasts and wobbling buttocks blobs.

Suddenly the shower was co-ed and the crowd, obscured by steam and her own tears, hooted and cat-called and she woke up gasping for air. When she tried to talk to Mom, she took it the wrong way, giving her a glass of red wine just like when Gala got her first period, and winking, slurring as she asked whether it was about a boy or a girl.

She paced around her room for a bit, enjoying the space. You couldn’t move freely on Mom’s boat, couldn’t pick up anything without knocking down something else. Mom wrapped herself in clutter like a security blanket, but Mom also once ripped off a big toenail putting on a sock, so you couldn’t begrudge her whatever made it possible for her to function at all.

On her way to the shower, she noticed something was up. Giggling, sideways glances that made her think her tampon string was showing.

Over breakfast—steak tartar drizzled with raw egg yolk, perpetrated by Magda—the others avoided looking at her, leaving her feeling like she’d interrupted something. Galadriel had resigned from the meal in protest, leaving a copy of Diet For A Dead Planet in her place.

Finally, Maryelizabeth asked, “So, dear . . . How did you sleep?”

The others tittered—honest to fuck, she’d never actually heard literal tittering before. Mother Mildred breezed in with a cat under each arm. “Wanda, it’s flea medicine time again, hon. Gala, let’s talk.”

In her office, Mildred drew the blinds. She fidgeted and checked her phone as if they were both waiting for someone else to come into the office and take charge. “I didn’t think I’d need to spell out our code of conduct so soon, but we don’t, um . . . we don’t condone onanism.”

“Wait, what? I already told you, I’m an atheist.”

“I thought you said you were an agnostic. Anyway, that’s not the point . . . ”

“Well . . . ” Little snippets of Gala’s dream filtered back to her, tripping up her train of thought. She ran her fingers through her hair, letting the tangles tug her scalp, letting the pain bring her back to the present. Onanism? “Oh wait! I didn’t, you know. Ewwww, God!”

“Everyone heard you . . . ”

Gala blushed so hard, her brain wilted from blood loss. “Okay, I wasn’t going to bother you about that, but what happened was a genuine mystical experience. It wasn’t sexual. I left my body, and I—I think I did something.”

“We heard what you did.” Mother Mildred took off her glasses and furtively licked each lens with the tip of her colorless tongue, then polished them on her habit. Without them, her eyes were the size of raisins. “We believe we can work powerful change here by contemplation and prayer. By pooling our energy as a force for good in the world, we are that gentle butterfly whose fluttering wings help to create a hurricane of positivity in the wider world.”

Gala was quite familiar with the hoary, phony-Zen concept, thanks, but she had her own ideas about how change comes about.

Gala saw herself more as a moth, drawn irresistibly to the false sun of a streetlamp on a moonless night, beating her wings helplessly against it, trying to win her way through to an unattainable day. Though her struggles might only singe her antennae, she could see how she might also fly in the face of a passing truck driver so he crashed into a utility pole, plunging the world into darkness and allowing the unpolluted light of Heaven to shine down on Earth. Call it Gala’s First Law of Punctured Equilibrium.

She didn’t try to explain this to Mildred, nor did she get too detailed about her dream, only admitting that she’d had a regular rarebit-fiend pillow-ripper of a nightmare and she was very sorry, it wouldn’t happen again.

Mother Mildred eyed her warily for a little while, then sprinkled some essential oils on her Tibetan salt lamp, and told her to go help Wanda dose the cats.

So long as she performed her assigned domestic chores and didn’t break the rules, which she now understood were many and various, though unwritten, Gala would have to work pretty hard to get tossed out of Saint Candy’s, which had to keep all its cells occupied to keep its endowment flowing.

She tried to throw herself into the work until she was too exhausted for nocturnal shenanigans. None of the cats would let her pet them and they’d scratched the shit out of her when she gave them flea medicine, and now she was pretty sure she had fleas in her hair.

She took a long shower and put on the softest music in her playlist, so low that she could barely hear it. She took melatonin and a glass of warm milk before falling asleep, and her last conscious thought was, Please, don’t let it happen again.

But it happened again.

6

A sickly old man lay in an eighteen-hole golf-course of a bed under an oxygen tent, swaddled in white eiderdown duvets, propped up on pillows stuffed with feathers of birds that went extinct for the privilege of bearing the heavy head of the shadow-pope.

The horrid, bloated apparition showed no interest in the soccer match playing on the jumbo flat-screen or the tray of pureed veal, foie gras and caviar in its lap, but betrayed some signs of life when an acolyte brought a cup of tea. Clawing itself out of the sumptuous bedding with tiny stick-bundle hands, he reached for the cup with a manifest greed, sunken eyes eagerly taking in the angelic beauty of the young priest’s face, then his figure as he hurried away.

It was quiet here . . . often too quiet, and the boys knew better than to come inside his tent, which was for their protection, as much as for his own health. But he relished the unique pinnacle of power he’d eked out for himself.

Without all the superfluous duties of ring-kissing, goodwill tours and empty public proclamations, he had found himself holding all the cards he’d ever hungered for. From this former monastery on the edge of the Vatican, he controlled the flow of money and secrets, the dispensation of patronage, and he had been mostly free to wallow in his earthly appetites.

“Don’t drink it,” someone whispered in his ear. “They’re poisoning you.”

The old man fumbled the teacup and it spilled on the spotless duvet cover.

“Who said that?” he rasped. He looked up and saw the burning words on the wall: MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.

The terrible portent etched itself on his eyes even when he covered them with his hands, but then a blast of furnace-heat shriveled the oxygen tent away and raised blisters on his flesh. A deafening voice shattered the teacup in his hand.

“NOT FEELING SO INFALLIBLE NOW, ARE WE?”

He moved like a wet sack of broken glass, but he moved, scuttling across the bed to cling to the headboard, a Bernini bas-relief of porphyry depicting Jesus casting the money-changers out of the temple. His wildly searching eyes swept the room for the intruder. If he concentrated, he could almost see a grainy phantasm of a tall, thin female form looming at the foot of his bed with her hands planted on her immodest hips, and wings.

“So correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but women can’t be trusted because an old book says one of us tempted man to eat a fruit that made him stop being a dumb animal, but you cross-dressing buzzkills are in charge because God forced Himself on a married virgin and knocked her up to redeem us for being exactly as shitty as He made us. That just kind of blows my mind, honestly.”

The shadow-pope was not so shaken up as she’d expected by her entrance. He was quite prepared to lecture even angels about God’s divine mysteries, and after boldly fluffing his own pillow and taking a bracing sip of sparkling mineral oil, he embarked upon his defense of the mother church as the bride of Christ and the infallible instrument of His divine might. “If you will allow me—”

“I WON’T,” she roared, in a piercing tone that cracked his flat-screen just before Italy scored a winning goal to clinch the European Cup. “I’m not here to fuck with you. I just want to see the phone.”

“The . . . What?”

“The one you use to talk to God. There is one, right? Otherwise, you’re just howling in the wind with the rest of us, hearing what you want to hear. Ever read Julian Jaynes? He said that early humans had a split brain, so thoughts from the right hemisphere were like totally alien voices, and everybody thought it was gods talking to them. He’s been discredited, I think, but you guys go around worshipping your own pricks, and you’re not allowed to even use them . . .

“Anyway . . . where is my head? What’s it look like? Is it like a gold princess phone, or a red blinking phone like Batman has, and when He calls, you go down fireman poles and come out in papal battle-gear, ready for action . . . but you guys aren’t about action, are you? When it rings, do you even answer it? Or is it down in the cellar with all the winged dildos and squicky statues from Pompeii and the proof that everything Jesus said was stolen from a hermetic mushroom-cult on the Dead Sea, and the thought of it ringing makes you shit your nine-hundred thread-count sheets?”

The shadow-pope was still struggling to offer a well-constructed retort to this profane rhetorical onslaught when Gala, sauntering around the chamber, stopped at a particularly ostentatious piece of décor. “What the fuck is this? See, this is what I’m talking about. What the fuck is this shit?”

The shadow-pope explained that she was looking at a gift from the Ottoman Empire, circa 1750. A ship in a bottle large enough to fit a human body, with hull of gold, exquisite rigging of braided silver and platinum and mother-of-pearl sails.

“See, you know those teeming millions of hungry, poor miserable people who hang on your every word about how they’ll get everything they’ve got coming to them in Heaven? It seems like you could feed and clothe and house the fuck out of all those poor suckers, if you just had a damn garage sale, once in a while.”

This wasn’t turning out anything like the shadow-pope had always expected a heavenly visitation would go down. He was beginning to suspect he was entertaining a succubus, so he picked up his very ordinary cordless phone and tried to recall which of the speed-dial buttons would summon an exorcist.

“I’m not getting through to you, am I?” Gala summoned patience, but what was the point? She waved her hand and the room vanished.

The shadow-pope found himself standing on a golden poop-deck beneath masts rigged with gleaming threads and scalloped, opalescent sails.

“Pretty neat, huh?” Gala strolled round the shadow-pope as he stared flabbergasted, waiting for him to realize where they were. “Bet you didn’t know what was inside that tacky ship in a bottle, did you? Inside the cargo hold is a whole mess of ships in bottles, each about the size of an Old English 800 forty-ouncer . . . and inside the holds of those ships, there’re even more bottles, each with a ship about the size of a June bug. That’s where we are right now . . . on a ship in a bottle in a ship in a bottle in a ship in a bottle.

“Think about that for a second. All those artisans working to make this ridiculous thing, going blind fitting the tiniest ships with little sails and shit, getting their hands chopped off for the slightest mistake, putting those ships in tiny bottles, then those bottles in little ships, then those ships in bottles . . . all to make this ugly-ass thing you never bothered to even look inside. It’s a pretty apt metaphor for your whole operation.

“So I gotta figure, if you’re special enough to have God’s ear, if you’re more than just the hod-boss of an international pedophile ring, you’ll get sprung out of here faster than I can say, ‘Amen.’”

The shadow-pope decided he’d had quite enough of this, and realizing he was still holding the phone, he began stabbing buttons, but he could not get a signal, and the disrespectful angel was gone, and his stomach began to grumble, and he wracked his brains for the secret prayer of extreme urgency that he was instructed in when he first became pope, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the words.

***

The actual papal apartments were a lot less tacky than the shadow-pope’s swinging bachelor pad, but it still felt like a poverty-porn act, somehow even more offensive. The humble twin bed beside a nightstand piled with dog-eared copies of St. Augustine and Origen and Nietzsche and letters from faithful followers all around the world looked like a temporary installation in a Vegas art gallery, made the Pope look like a weeping hood ornament on an out-of-control limousine.

He was sitting at a desk in his library and reading letters, tears streaming down his face, when Gala manifested before him. “So, how does this work? When you say yes and the shadow-pope says no, do you guys just arm-wrestle, or what? Because you’re supposed to be the good cop, and the other guy was a useless shit, so I had to do away with him. Are you really a nice guy?”

The Pope looked about him for some context in which to place this cranky young American tourist whose scornful words somehow burst forth in his brain as if in his native tongue. If he was not as predisposed as his predecessor to accept a divine visitation as his due, he had also come to believe that world events were building towards a crisis of such proportions that God, sooner or later, would have to step in.

But there were a lot of simpler explanations than divine intervention for this woman in ripped leggings and a Bad Brains T-shirt berating him in the small hours of the morning. All the lights on his security console glowed green. No intruder had been detected. He asked her what she would have him do.

“I don’t know . . . Do a miracle. A good one. If he listens to anyone, it’s you guys, right? You have all those giant antenna-penises pointed at Heaven, so get on the horn and ask for something people actually need. Make manna rain down where people are hungry. Hoogy-doogy the weather so nobody freezes to death on the street tonight. Cure some diseases. Curse some bad guys. Just once, do something good?”

The Pope shook his beleaguered head, pressing his temples. Was this some diabolical test? With genuine sorrow wilting his voice, every word an apology, he told her that if she was sent from above, she would know as well as he that this was simply not how it was done. The age of miracles had passed, and—

“Okay, I get it. Whatever. Let’s try an easy one. Let women be priests. Stop picking on gay and trans folks. Stop pretending it’s God’s grand design every time a bomb falls on an orphanage, but it’s the end of the fucking world when a woman has to get an abortion. Any one of those, coming from you, would be an acceptable miracle. Just do it.”

Again, the Pope vacillated and agonized before explaining that this was simply not how it was—

“Okay, I’ve heard enough. Let’s go. Maybe the next guy will listen to me.”

The Pope hid his eyes from a flash of blinding light. When it subsided, he beheld Gala as an angel as depicted in so many Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation; a cold, androgynous giant with glittering wings that unfurled to span the width of the papal apartment.

Before the Pope could react, Gala took him in her arms like a swaddled babe and launched herself from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, smashing through the french doors and rocketing up into the sky like a shoulder-fired Stinger missile.

Looking down from the angel’s arms as the Vatican, then Rome, then all of Italy fell away at his feet, as the clouds parted to admit them to the frigid void beyond the sky, the Pope experienced a rare moment of doubt. Not in God or the Church, for he had given his life to both, but almost worse was the nagging fear that perhaps his creator was no more nor less insane than the world at his feet.

To be summoned by divine command by the Angel of Death Azrael, to be carried bodily up to Heaven on angel’s wings, was an honor reserved for prophets and saints, and the Pope knew he was neither. He was only a good man who had found himself at the wheel of a great, glittering ship that waddled rudderless across the heaving seas, running over most of the drowning humanity it was pledged to rescue. How could he ever hope for such an act of grace from a savior who had galled him all his life with His unwillingness to make good on the promises the Pope and all his long line of white, male, mostly celibate predecessors had been impotently tossing out after every plague, pogrom and genocidal insanity visited upon His creation? Did he deserve such an honor, when the world at large had never seemed so far from salvation?

As if she’d read his mind, Gala said, “Nope,” and dropped him. “Mene mene tekel upharsin, bitch.”

Screaming with such pure mortal terror that it became almost ecstasy, the Pope fell so fast, his humble bedclothes were scorched by the friction of re-entry. By the time he reached the clouds, he was clutching his heart in a frozen fetal position, his screams magically amplified into a doomsday trumpet that awoke half of Rome. Some even went to their windows in time to see the flailing speck of a man in a soiled nightgown clawing at empty air all the way down to St. Peter’s Basilica, and heard the resounding crash of his fall.

7

The best gifts, Gala knew, were the ones you forgot you gave yourself.

Like the cheap molly you misplaced when you were strung out, that magically appeared as you were packing your things to move after a bad break-up. Or the fifty bucks in cash you found in the lining of a parka with a hole in the pocket, that you thought you’d lost at a shitty full-moon rave at Hunter’s Point. In spite of her other faults, past-you occasionally managed to unwittingly give future-you exactly what you needed, the moment you needed it most.

Gala awoke that morning with such a bone-deep sense of satisfaction that not even the judgmental eyes of her fellow novitiates could shake her. If she was awash in that freshly-fucked-feeling yesterday, today she felt full-on fucking pregnant. Hormones on blast. She needed an outlet, and like magic, Gala had stumbled upon something she’d started once during an especially shitty PMS week and completely forgotten: a Kill List.

1. King Maha Vajiralongkorn: semi-divine king of Thailand. Worth $35-40 billion, presides over poverty and misery with harem of forty consorts in luxuriant spa-hotel in Germany.

2. Dr. Phil. Nuff said.

3. Eoin Carson. Asshole who proposed to me, then broke up via text while I was still thinking about it.

4. MBS

5. ?

Tapping her pen against her teeth, she crossed out her ex’s name and then the word “Kill,” because he wasn’t worth the trouble, and Kill sounded wrong. That wasn’t what she was about. But “reform” was a pretty weak word; she wasn’t starting a nonprofit, and if there was no getting through to these people . . . Somewhere between Dickens’ Christmas Ghosts and the Khmer Rouge would be the ideal approach.

Under #5, she wrote ALL BILLIONAIRES and then #6: FACTORY FARMS-MONOCULTURE.

Wow.

That changed the scope of her operations a bit, and diverged from her original theme, and she still hadn’t factored in diversity . . . For every Christian fraud with a lot to answer for, there must be a dozen mullahs, Hindu nationalists, infibulating witch-doctors and godless petty dictators out there fomenting misery and division, who deserved a visit from the Truth Fairy.

Oh good name, she thought. She should design a costume. And then there was the other question, the one she realized she’d been manically: What if this is all in your head?

Maybe it was just an incredible coincidence that the evangelical minister she had a magical, mystical sort-of sex dream about the night before last simultaneously hit his head and fell off his houseboat, and his corpse was later found by authorities in the middle of a tug-of-war between two enormous alligators . . . She felt pretty bad about that . . . about as bad as her body felt good. But did she cause it?

Maybe it was all a dream. But last night felt so real, from the shock of spontaneous orgasm to the thrill of power, the looks on their faces . . .

There was only one way to find out.

Throwing on a robe, she went into the TV room. Wanda and Magda were fighting over the remote. Wanda needed therapeutic hate-watching, while Magda needed to use the big TV to jack into her old VHS camcorder to search for cthonic transmissions in the resultant video feedback. Gala hadn’t been here long enough to judge their demeanor, but something about them felt off-kilter; they were giddy, like spinsters at a slumber party. Neither of them took any notice of her when she asked if they could just watch the news for a minute.

And then it hit her.

She’d gotten no noise complaints last night, and when she left her body, she was buoyed on a wave of ecstatic energy like nothing she’d ever known before. She’d started some kind of masturbation cult in the nunnery.

The noisy stalemate was broken by Maryelizabeth stampeding in, taking the remote out of the throttling hands of her sisters and putting on CNN.

Gala flopped on the couch, heaving a sigh of relief so intense, she half-expected to see her soul leaving her body as a pale pink mist.

Hooray. The Pope wasn’t dead.

There he was giving a press conference, but he wasn’t up on his precious balcony, and was wearing a sweaty T-shirt that looked like it came from a church poor-box. Eyes half-lidded, glistening with flop-sweat, he looked like a hostage rescued from a long kidnapping. Mumbling into the bouquet of microphones, the Pope’s voice was drowned out by a very confused interpreter.

“ . . . Church has received a sign, and we have made the following decrees . . . women can be priests . . . priests can marry . . . all people should live and love as God made them . . . we respect women’s decisions about their bodies . . . More on this later . . . Forgive me, I’m very tired . . . ”

The Pope started to leave as the astonished press shouted questions. Just before they cut away, the loudest shouter demanded to know the truth about rumors that the retired prelate had disappeared from his apartments and was feared kidnapped, and was this outrageous proclamation not some kind of ransom negotiation for his return?

The Pope turned back to the microphones and threw up his hands. “Do I look like I have all the fucking answers? Look, I’m steering this big, corrupt ship that takes centuries to change course, and we’re not infallible and honestly, we’ve been a big fat joke ever since we lost the power to torture anyone who steps out of line. It’s enough to make you long for those days, I tell you . . . and then I know I’m losing my mind, and yet, God has not said a word.

“So look . . . You heard what I said. I’m really sorry, okay? We’re all really fucking sorry . . . for all of it.” Muttering Fuck one more time, the Pope threw up his hands and wandered off-camera.

Maryelizabeth was crouching on the floor, clasping her rosary beads and fervently praying for guidance. Wanda and Magda just blinked at each other for a moment, then started dancing arm in arm in circles and hooting, honest-to-God hooting, pray you never hear it yourself. Gala was about to leave the room and go back to work on her list, but then another question hit her. So this is real—but for how long?

Whatever was causing this, be it sunspots or PMS, she’d be damned if she didn’t make the most of it while it lasted. The free-floating excitement of the morning had settled as a molten weight in her groin. Holy shit, she was horny. And if she hurried, she’d have the shower to herself.

She scooted down the hall, smiling behind her hand. A mild-mannered agnostic nun by day, whenever hypocrisy strikes, Sister Gala flicks her magic bean to become—

Galadriel was in the shower, washing her hair and desecrating “Angel of the Morning” at the top of her lungs. Gala flushed all the toilets and ran for her cell.

She put on her headphones and cued up some moody darkwave jazz and flopped on the bed, legs akimbo. She was a rank amateur at masturbation because it simply never worked for her, before, except for the near-drowning incident. Mom unironically called the clit the Devil’s doorbell and said masturbation was for icky boys, and girls didn’t need it.

Like a second puberty, she felt all the things they warned her about when she was thirteen. Her clitoris positively throbbed, aching to be touched. She almost wanted to tease herself, make it last until they called for breakfast. But the moment she touched herself, fifty thousand watts of epileptic pleasure jolted through her unprepared body. Like a fire alarm, it rang and rang and she screamed just to let it out, screamed all the way up into the stratosphere.

Looking down on the world, she tried to remember the names on the list. Fuck it. She could just drop out of the sky blindly like a dart thrown at a map, and land on something evil. She looked down between where her feet would be if she’d brought them. Looked down at . . . what was that . . . Barstow? Visalia?

“Please God, if you’re up there, show me a sign. I just . . . can’t with this anymore. I can’t. Nothing’s keeping me here, but I don’t . . . I don’t want to go to Hell . . . ”

Gala heard this tear-choked voice coming from everywhere, but it was louder when she looked down. Weird. She could hear people pray.

Oh shit. The other shoe drops. Millions of people must be praying at any given time. Even her mother knew the act of prayer was mostly talking to yourself to find serenity and acceptance in stressful times. Only her grandmother thought it was like 9-1-1, and expected results.

This isn’t my job . . . fuck . . .

“What’s not your job? Hello?”

Shit. She can hear me think . . .

“Who are you? Please, if this is a joke—I’m not joking . . . Don’t fuck with me, I’m serious!”

Gala was still grappling with how she could hear whoever she was hearing and how they could hear her, then realized she could probably hear that, too. Okay, um . . . don’t die. Okay? Just . . . where are you?

“I’m in my room . . . ? Where are you? Am I going crazy? I’m hearing voices. Just tell me to do it.”

No! Don’t kill yourself. Don’t—

She had a head full of things to tell someone to talk them out of committing suicide, things she’d heard from therapists and counselors and friends and celebrities doing PSAs as part of mandatory community service, and it was all bullshit: It gets better. Your friends and family would be devastated. Tomorrow could be the best day of your life. Do you want to go to Hell?

This wasn’t her job, but she didn’t see anyone else hurtling down from Heaven to settle Tamara’s case. She thought of all those calls to Ireland, and it hit home how big of a debt she owed the universe, if anyone was keeping score. Put on a pot, my child, the wee American buck eejit has her knickers in a twist again . . .

Tell me where you live . . . What’s your address?

“Please go away . . . ”

NO! LISTEN . . . I’m sorry, I’m new at this . . . I want to help. Okay, what’s your name, and how old are you?

“Tamara . . . I’m fifteen . . . ?”

The way she ended every declarative statement as half a question, she had to be Californian. Hi, Tamara. I’m not a voice in your head, but I’m not God, either. I know what you’re going through . . .

“Do you really?”

I’m just like you . . . I can go places and do things nobody else can, but I’m still figuring it out. Can you hear my voice, like in your head, or in your room?

“It feels like you’re in my heart, I guess . . . ? I’m talking real low, because I don’t . . . I can’t . . . I don’t want them to hear me . . . ”

I know it’s, when you’re growing up and sh-stuff, it feels like the whole world either doesn’t care if you die or wants to use you for a cum-dumpster, pardon my French—

Tamara let out a brittle little laugh. “You’re nasty . . . You’re not an angel, are you? I’ve been praying and nothing happens . . . ? Nobody listens. I don’t know who you are, but I’m gonna . . . I wanna . . . just . . . go . . . ”

Okay . . . Tamara . . . Talk to me. It’ll make you feel better. Tell me what’s wrong?

“I want to die, okay? I can’t do this . . . I’m fifteen and I have MS and it’s really bad . . . My mom is terminal. I was trying to wait until she’s gone, but her . . . my stepdad . . . he hates me. My mom is dying and when she’s gone, it’s just him and me. I can’t leave and nobody cares. I just . . . I can’t go to church any more, and I don’t want to go to Hell, if Hell is like this forever. It can’t be any worse . . . Why would God make the world like this and then send you to Hell just because you couldn’t take it?”

Okay stop right there, Tamara. I feel you, okay? But here’s the good news. There’s no God. No Devil, no heaven, no hell, but right now, you’ve got me and I swear, I’ll do everything in my power . . .

“There’s no God?”

Not that I know of, and believe me, I’ve looked. All we’ve got is each other. This is all there is—

“You’re sure?”

I . . . What’s your stepfather’s name? Because I guarantee I’ll pay that fucker a visit.

“It’s Larry. Larry Clugston. I don’t want . . . Can you cure my mom?”

She had to think about that. Why not? If she could shrink a pope, why couldn’t she also cure disease and resurrect everybody’s dead pets? Okay, I admit I don’t have my phone with me and I don’t actually, like, know what MS is, but I’m willing to give it a shot . . .

“It’s a debilitating hereditary condition caused by the immune system attacking the nervous system, and you really suck at this.”

I know, Tamara. But like . . . It might seem impossible now, okay, but someday, you’ll look back on this and you’ll be so grateful that you stuck it out . . .

“Stick it out. Really?”

I know how it sounds, but—

“There’s no God. No Hell. No Heaven . . . ?”

No, just, can we move past that?

“Okay, thank you. That’s good news, I guess . . . ? Anyway. Goodbye.”

Gala dropped like a terminal-phase intercontinental ballistic missile, straining for any change in the sound of the girl’s voice to home in on. Tamara? Honey, just keep talking, I’m coming to your house. Don’t die . . .

Tamara wasn’t talking.

Talk to me, Tamara! BTS are a bunch of twinks. Taylor Swift sucks! Talk to me! Don’t . . . don’t . . .

She was circling a hundred miles above central California when a thunderous pounding whiplashed her back down to Earth.

8

She came awake hyperventilating in her bed. Her hands went to her ears and ripped off her headphones, but she could still hear the nightmare sound. Something was trying to claw its way into her head.

She’d had a nightmare. Only natural, after last night . . . but if last night was real, how could she deny what just happened?

She jumped at a skirling feline howl and the ratcheting of a skeleton key in her door. It sprang open and bounced off the wall. Mother Mildred stormed in with an angry feral cat tucked under her arm. “Gala, my office,” she barked. The cats hissed.

Gala sprang out of bed and started to get dressed. “Now!” She caught a glimpse of the blood in the nun’s eyes and belted her robe, followed her to the office.

She knew that look and tone from a thousand buddy-cop movies. The loose-cannon rookie was about to get a furious dressing-down from the captain. Maybe even have to turn in her badge and gun and go rogue to crack the case.

But what was this? As she stirred her cold tea with her asthma inhaler, Mildred radiated something else. She was scared out of her fucking mind.

“I thought we were clear about the rules in our little talk yesterday,” Mother Mildred muttered.

“Look, I swear to G—I didn’t just touch myself, okay? It was a religious experience. And I wasn’t the only one. Maybe if everyone around here got their rocks off once in a while, things would go a lot smoother.”

Mildred sipped her tea through teeth clenched so tight, they squeaked. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

“I think something real is happening here, like spiritually, okay? I thought that was what this place was all about, reaching out to a higher power and affecting change. You said that yourself, right? Well, I’m telling you, things are changing, and if we all come together . . . so to speak . . . ”

Mildred took out her phone. At first, Gala was ticked she didn’t seem to be holding the mother’s attention, then something occurred to her. “Wait, I can prove it. I need your phone.” Mildred rolled her eyes. “Fine, you do it. Look up Tamara Clugston, okay? She’s fifteen and she has MS and she’s being abused and she’s going to commit suicide. We have to do something—”

Shaking her head like it was coming unscrewed, Mildred tabbed up a recording and let it play.

Gala winced at the sound of her own voice, sleepily mumbling, “Do a miracle. A good one. If he listens to anyone, it’s you guys, right? You have all those giant antenna-penises pointed at Heaven, so get on the horn—”

“You bugged my fucking room?”

Mildred locked her phone and put it where Gala couldn’t reach it. “No, this was recorded in Galadriel’s cell, next to yours.”

“How is one supposed to quietly contemplate the cloud of unknowing or whatever, if we can hear each other breathe?”

“That’s not the point, Gala. We acknowledge that there are signs of a power at work . . . ” Gala noticed the Independent Journal on Mildred’s desk, the picture of the Pope standing on the balcony overlooking the Vatican plaza in his stained T-shirt. POPE RESIGNS? asked the headline: DECLARES ANNULMENT OF CATHOLIC CHURCH?

Gala held up the newspaper next to her face. “I know, right? Did you see the news? It gets even better. What I did with that shadow-pope douchebag?” She made a chef’s-kiss gesture. “I fully realize that I should be more responsible in the future . . . But seriously . . . Tamara Clugston. Just Google her . . . please?”

“That’s not the problem.” Mildred snatched away the paper and took a honking hit off her inhaler, then tried to strike a more informal posture, the just-us-gals act Gala’s mother used when she was about to throw her out again. “I just feel like . . . if God chose a vessel to enact his will on Earth, it’d be someone a little more . . . I don’t know . . . even-tempered? I can see this is upsetting you, so let me put it this way. You’re the kind of person who stubs her toe on a rock and goes, ‘Down with rocks!’ No thought about how anyone else might feel, or what they need.”

“Maybe you’re right. I mean, sometimes, rocks are good. But some people need to be hit in the head with one to make them see that it hurts. Do you think God picked Joan of Arc because she was super level-headed?”

“Gala, just let it go . . . ”

“Well, either she was schizophrenic or God really told her to go lead an army, but the king of France was totally cool with it, until he found out she was a girl.”

“Oh, here we go.” Mildred had no patience for this. “Just between us girls . . . People like you are dangerous enough without power. Look at you, crowning yourself the Queen of All Everything when you’re not even queen of yourself. That’s why I worry that at best, you could be leading us into heresy . . . ”

“Heresy? Seriously?”

“And at worst, if there is some agency acting through you, it may well be the exact opposite of a higher power. We don’t make judgments here, but this kind of thing . . . I think even you’ll agree, it’s dangerous.” Lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she added, “Satan doesn’t tell you, ‘Believe in me.’ He urges you to believe in yourself. Anyway, there’s only one sure way to deal with it.”

“So . . . exorcism? Cool. Lay it on me.”

“No . . . We’re not living in the Dark Ages, now.” Mildred took another hit off her inhaler and slurped her tea. She looked like she was having a panic attack.

“Are you kicking me out?” She stood up, brushing flea powder off her bathrobe. “Fine . . . Well, I guess I’ll just go . . . get my things . . . ”

“No . . . I’m sorry, but . . . ” Mildred didn’t meet her gaze. Kept her tiny eyes fixed on the desk until two men in white smocks barged into the office without knocking.

Gala backed up against a bookshelf. “You’re fucking kidding, right? Who are these assholes?”

One of the goons asked her not to resist as he bent her right arm behind her back until her fingers touched her shoulder blades.

“Oh my God, are you having me committed?” Gala grabbed the arms of her chair. “I quit. I’m—”

The goon expressed regret that she insisted on resisting. He elbowed her facedown on the desk as the other one injected liquid nitrogen into her neck with a bicycle pump.

Gala wasn’t resisting at all, until the needle in her neck. It was like a tranquilizer dart and made her see that all along, she’d just been a defective sex doll until someone pricked her, and now all the pink mist was leaking out. She tried to stand and break free, but all she could do was deflate and collapse across Mother Mildred’s desk, spilling her tea.

9

There are times in life when you cling to the things you love, when they nurture and sustain the truth of who you are and the light you’re carrying, even when you just want the world to snuff it out. But there are also times when the pain is so raw that you know your cherished security blankets will only be stained by the memory of the pain.

Right now was one of the latter category.

Someone had taken all of her things from her cell at Sister Candy’s and transplanted them here, in this room so white that she couldn’t see the corners where wall met floor or ceiling; and in the blinding light that seemed to come from everywhere, her clothes and music and the unidentifiable stuffed animal she’d slept with all her life looked like muddy roadside junk.

Worse, someone had jacked her most downbeat, wrist-slitting playlist into the ancient public address system. Maybe it was intended to give her an anchor, but it only itemized the pathetic tokens collected in a waste of a lonely little life, and the strains of Nirvana’s “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle” made her nervous system want to climb out of her skin and slap somebody.

But that was where they overplayed their hand. If the music selection wasn’t so gratingly obvious, she would just go on hating herself and being a proper patient, assuming she was in some kind of mental hospital and not abducted by aliens, who would probably have more sensitivity to a probing victim’s aesthetic needs.

She was in a bed. She couldn’t tell if she was strapped down or so medicated that she couldn’t get out of it, or if her brains had been scooped out and decanted into a counterfeit body of latex and balsa wood. A nurse came in every so often but moved so fast, she was a white blur amid the static blur-scape of the room, in and out and needles in her arm, pills down her throat before she could resist.

Her thoughts were pebbles of regret that ripped through the gummy residue of her brain like cranial gallstones, pulses of ugly truth that left her fragile self-image in agonized shreds.

Looking back, it was all so obvious . . .

She’d always thought she must be slightly insane because the world seemed insane and there was no place for her in it, and the whole world couldn’t be insane, could it? Eating itself, beating itself and stomping around in its own ashes, pumping its fists and shooting selfies while everything good burned and rotted and fell away.

No, it must be her, because she couldn’t get with the program, couldn’t strap on a bib and compete in the pie-eating contest of eternal misery.

But now, with the help of industrial strength anti-psychotics and oh-god-no-not-John-Prine-too coming out of the tarnished brass speaker like heartbreakingly slow electroshock therapy, she realized that she had truly snapped when she seemed to find her power. She bottomed out when she had locked into this bonkers delusion that she could leave her body and punish sinners like an avenging atheist angel.

She looked forward to being cured, to wanting to go into real estate and binge Netflix and let the Internet judge her appearance, to strap on that bib and start eating ashes with the oblivious gusto of a self-loathing champion.

She just wanted to make the world better, and in the creeps and crooks peddling false hope and hateful dogma, she saw the dam that needed to be blown to let real change, real love, flow. She could go after corporate evildoers every night for a century and never get through to one. She’d have to kill them all, but worse ones would always be waiting to take their places.

Why didn’t she just use her powers for good? Set all the animals free and infect everyone on Earth with that tick virus that makes humans allergic to red meat, or just share vegetarian recipes that actually taste good, put heart-nourishing playlists on everybody’s iPhones and urge stupid men to get their significant others flowers once in a while so they don’t end up alone and heartbroken and trying to destroy the world?

There you go, talking crazy again, no wonder they locked you up. She couldn’t even help the figments of her imagination. Sorry, Tamara.

She wasn’t going to get better until she let go of this absurd notion that she could change anything, and she wanted to get better, yes please. She wanted to listen to influencers and share memes and take personality surveys to find out which Transformer she was, she wanted more than anything to want what the world wanted her to want, and nothing more.

“I’m all better now!” she called out, and though only a feeble croak emitted from her parched throat, the echoes of it rebounded off the walls of white light until she couldn’t hear John Prine mourn Sam Stone anymore, at least. “I’m cured! Hooray . . . science . . . ”

Someone came in, moving almost slow enough to be perceived with the naked eye. A white tornado hovered over her, shining a penlight into her eyes to measure pupil dilation, taking her pulse and reading her vital statistics, then whipped out a syringe the size of a caulking gun.

She focused and stared hard enough to read the legend embroidered on the breast of the white coat—Larkspur Cloisters—and she mumbled, “Hey, isn’t this where Jerry Garcia died?”

She tried to ward off the incoming needle, but there was no stopping it. She could only watch helplessly as it descended towards her neck and wonder at the mysteries of life as it detoured to insert itself into the nurse’s own arm.

The nurse slowed down from a cyclone to a snowstorm, then merely a sad-looking Asian woman with dark circles under her eyes and chapped lips that kept whispering the same thing over and over again, so faint and so low that Gala had to lean in close enough to smell the minty-toothpaste-and-lung-cancer smell of her breath to make it out.

“You have to hurry.”

The nurse sank to the floor in a boneless heap. Gala levered herself to a sitting position and dangled her long legs off the bed. She rubbed her face, getting lost in the contours and the texture and wondering what she’d do first, fall in love with a chatbot or take an award-winning snapchat of her cafeteria breakfast and medication cup, now that she was cured.

“You have to hurry,” came the voice from the speakers.

She stood up, feeling like a lofty, top-heavy tree in a high wind, uprooting one foot and then the other in the direction of the half-open door. It took her almost the entire duration of Portishead’s “Wandering Star” to step over the snoring nurse and hobble across the endless little room. She reflexively grabbed her tattered stuffed animal on the way out.

Wandering down the hall, it was weird how the whole insane asylum seemed to be grooving on her playlist, how the voice coming over the speakers got louder every time it repeated, “You have to hurry.” By the time Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” had concluded, she had reached the nursing station, where every peaked cap lay on crossed hands beside an empty medication cup. She stepped over doctors and patients lying in pools of drool with glassy, unseeing eyes.

She worried she would shatter when she hit the glass doors and the sunlight looked like a rain of dirt next to the pure, cold white light inside. Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” was almost over before she reached them, and she was still wondering which ex-boyfriend put that tedious junkie on her phone, when they swung open on their own (a miracle!) and she stepped outside.

“You have to hurry,” said the sun.

She tried to hurry, but the sun was sinking lower in the sky and the cars on the road were a continuous scream of plastic and steel and the Cadillac limousine waiting for her in the parking lot with its flashers on, pulsing in time with the voice of the sun, seemed to recede away as fast as she could shamble towards it.

Someone got out of the car and came to take her arm and she moved faster then, almost as fast as glass warps because glass is a liquid, and platypuses fluoresce under UV light and nobody knows why . . .

Things only began to flow at their customary speed once she was sitting in the car and it was moving.

The old woman on the seat across from her said, “I tried to tell you, sweetheart . . . All mortal things will fail you.” She laid a hand on Gala’s knee that smelled of tea rose and lavender. “People too.”

10

Gala never thought of herself as an intellectual; indeed, she wished she was an idiot, because at least idiots were generally happy, and the worse the world got, the happier they seemed to be.

When she rage-quit high school after a teacher rejected her term paper on The War of the Gargantuas as a discourse on the duality of humankind, she told herself she’d somehow blown it by becoming too aware of how everything worked, and now she could never share in the simple joys of prom, professional sports or a Chick-fil-A franchise coming to town.

When all her friends posted pics of themselves in their disposable polyester gowns on their diploma perp walk and all their college acceptance letters, Gala consoled herself with a crazy fantasy that she’d be approached any day now by a representative of some kind of anti-CIA, a radical cabal of super-smart people working behind the scenes to save the world from itself.

And now, five years too late, here they were.

The old woman introduced herself as Esme Rappaport, squeezing Gala’s knee and microwaving her with positive vibes. “I’m so sorry for what they put you through, dear,” she said in a voice like creamy steel wool, offering Gala a cup of orange pekoe tea. “We had no idea they’d go so far, but we should’ve anticipated that your mission would be met with fear and mistrust. We’ve been watching you for quite a while, waiting for you to reach your full potential.”

“You could’ve said something,” Gala muttered into the teacup. Each sip seemed to chip away at the hoar-frost coating her brain and nerves. She could feel her shaking hands sucking the warmth out of the cup, so she slurped it and looked out the window until her mind had thawed out. “You know why kids like the Harry Potter books? It’s not all the magic shit, though that’s pretty cool . . . It’s that every adult tells Harry how important and brave and smart and special he is. Even if it’s a lie, everybody deserves that . . . ”

“Maybe we could have groomed you, but we’ve been doing this for a very long time, and we’ve learned the risks are too great. Think about all the experiences that forced you to grow. Were they pleasant ones? If we spared you the pain, we would have blunted your development. You would have been satisfied with any little demonstration of your special gifts, and never become as powerful as you are.”

“But now, you’re ready to use me.” She’d seen enough of these movies to know how this shit worked. Her last boyfriend, Eoin, the comix troll who lived in an RV in his parents’ driveway, lived for this shit.

The ugly duckling finds out they’re really a mutant super-swan, but in a perennially unexpected and lazy plot twist, the people who awakened the new superheroine turn out to be villains intent on manipulating them for their nefarious scheme, and the superheroine proceeds to tear it all down and defeat an evil doppelganger in a spectacular deluge of expensive graphics.

She stuck around with Eoin longer than she should have for pondering the appeal of this shit, but then she put together how superhero fantasies flattered armchair Wolverines into staying on the couch, affirming their latent specialness with adult-sized Underoos and limited-edition action figures and requiring no real-world superheroics whatsoever.

She’d scoffed at this kind of cheap adult pacifier action then, but hadn’t she always felt it, too? In the still of the night, when it was so quiet she could hear her earbuds and phone-charger cables tying themselves in knots in her messenger bag, had she never felt as if someone were watching over her, shedding a spectral tear over her trials and tribulations and waiting for her to ripen, all the while whispering to themselves, “This one is special”?

Get a journal, Gala.

So anyway . . .

The limousine took them to Tiburon and they drove onto a ferry that didn’t appear to be taking any other passengers. The boat got underway immediately and took less than ten minutes to cross the strait. Esme refilled her cup and lowered the partition to whisper instructions to the driver. Gala wondered if she should be suspicious, or pretend to be.

“Our retreat is on a sequestered parcel of Angel Island,” Esme explained. “We find it helps direct our spiritual energies and screen out impure influences.”

Angel Island: once home to the detention centers where immigrants from Asia waited for months or years to be admitted to America, or sent back home. Aside from some park rangers and tourists, day-hikers and mountain bikers, the island was an uninhabited state park, or so she thought.

“What kind of work? Are you guys like a church?”

Esme nearly spit out her tea. “Heavens no, dear! We’re not just a passive vessel of received dogma. We do what you do, and while we’re not nearly so effective, we like to think we’ve made a difference in the world.”

Gala watched the waves, the spouts of spray off the blunt bow of the ferry. When people are dismissive or insulting, it sucks, but you know where you stand. But when they suck up to you, it’s like they bribe you in bills with no numbers on them, and you only find out how much you owe them later.

“I imagine you must have many questions,” Esme went on, “even some doubts. We’ll give you all the answers you need once we’ve reached our retreat. But for now, suffice to say that we sympathize with what you’ve done, and we want to amplify your efforts.”

Speeding off the ferry and onto the narrow paths of the empty park, the limousine went halfway around the island to Point Blunt, where they turned up a shady secret driveway that led to the old Nike missile base.

At the end of a forested box canyon, they stopped before a three-story Victorian house festooned with gable windows, fanciful turrets and fussy gingerbread, all of a spotless, milky pale color, as if freshly cast from white chocolate.

A valet ushered them from the car to the front porch, where another old woman sat on a glider with her legs crossed in a way that would’ve given Gala arthritis, hands steepled in silent meditation or prayer. Gala tiptoed past her, startled when the woman tipped her a wink and jumped up to give her a big, bony bear-hug.

Gala was introduced to way too many old women, as just trying to find a bathroom became a goodwill tour. She remembered none of their names, and they all seemed like variations on the same theme. They reminded her of her old teachers and therapists with their wounded smiles on finely wrinkled faces, mood rings and clanky turquoise bracelets, floral print dresses or smart pantsuits with colorful, wispy scarves in spiritually nourishing sunset colors.

They all greeted her with the same mixture of awe and insecurity of lifelong devotees meeting a prodigy, of priests meeting a prophet. It was silly and weird and she wanted to tell them to mellow out, but maybe they were right to be a little bit afraid.

They were everywhere she looked, even staring out of the walls. Photographs in faded Kodachrome color, black and white and even sepia-toned daguerreotypes, the ghosts of librarians past, followed her with their earnest seekers’ eyes.

At last, Esme showed her to her room, where she was invited to bathe, nap and order whatever she liked to eat from the staffed kitchen to “gather your forces for this evening.”

Gala took advantage of all three, but couldn’t shake the free-floating dislocation of the drugs and the shock of everything she’d been through. As of this morning, she was an anti-religious zealot, an astral terrorist, an escaped mental patient.

She ordered quiche, a growler of mead and a slice of key lime pie, then took a shower and dropped into a deathlike sleep before it arrived.

She woke up to the pleasant aroma of room service and the antique tinkle of a bell. Through an intercom, Esme invited her to dress and prepare for the evening devotional.

After a calculatedly leisurely meal, Gala chose a pair of new underwear in her size, a pair of sturdy silk stockings that took a lot of abuse before they were ripped enough to suit her, a gown so white, it seemed to attract free-floating particles of dirt out of the air, and a couple CBD gummies someone had left in the underwear drawer. Then she rang the bell.

Esme entered and asked her to come down to lead the program.

“I really don’t know what you guys expect from me,” Gala said. “I mean, you’ve been hella cool and springing me out of the booby-hatch, that was a stone-cold mitzvah . . . but you know I don’t believe in any of this shit, right?”

“Oh, my dear,” Esme said, “that’s exactly why it had to be you.” Gently nudging Gala back to sit on the bed, Esme knelt before her, looking up at Gala with such naked hope that Gala was afraid she’d whip out an engagement ring. “If you believed in God, you’d only see what you believe in. It’s only because you see the world as it truly is, that you will be the one to wake Him up.”

11

Gala was still puzzling that one out as she was led down the stairs and out the front door. The assembled ladies flanked the pathway in white robes, each bearing a candle that made a lantern of her face.

She passed between them, nervously clasping her hands together and reflexively blessing everybody. Seeing the zealous ardor in their eyes, she had to lean in close to Esme and whisper, “So . . . how’s this going down? You gals just gonna form a circle around me and masturbate until we shame God into showing up, or what?”

Esme chuckled. “Nothing as sordid as all that. We’re just going to channel our collective energies, induce a hypnogogic state and let it come naturally.”

Naturally. Somehow, that word took on a sinister new connotation, but Gala couldn’t place why.

She walked down the line of supplicants to the end of the path, feeling them draw together to follow her in a witchy procession into a wooded grove paved with rough-hewn stones in a circle around an ancient, mossy Gaelic cross.

With no idea where to go, Gala stopped in front of it and turned to Esme, who threw her hands up.

“Please welcome Sister Gala into your hearts,” Esme called out. “Lift her up, and she will lead us to glory.”

She waited for them to start chanting or disrobing and dancing round an altar, but they just stood there with their eyes closed and their hands up, their candles outstretched. The flames seemed to dance in a wind that wasn’t there, to twist and flutter and stretch towards her.

She was just watching this, forgetting that anything was expected of her, when she found herself looking down on the flickering waves of light converging on her like the spokes of a wheel.

Before she knew it, the wheel had shrunk until it was only a mote of light on the black face of the Bay, blazing incongruously bright amid the strings and lattices of electricity from the cluster of tiny, shrinking cities. And still she climbed.

She heard a voice that seemed to come from behind her, as if Esme were riding her like a horse. “Now, I can tell you why you don’t believe in God.”

Gala felt as if she were about to fall from an even greater height than that from which she’d dropped the Pope.

With no head to turn, she searched for Esme but couldn’t see her, any more than she could see herself. But she heard the woman as if through a long-distance landline, and knew it was her body that was receiving the message.

“I don’t believe it because it’s bullshit,” she replied. “Every culture tells itself a story . . . ”

“Exactly right! The concept of God has evolved as a mirror of His worshippers, from the earliest solar gods and fertility goddesses to the infinite, cosmically distant pater familias we struggle to accept today. But what always remains constant?”

“He’s always a dick,” Gala blurted.

Esme laughed deliciously. “As I said, He is a mirror of our aspirations and fears. He is seen as creating the world and all its life, but He needs us to worship him, because we create and recreate Him with our belief.”

“When you put it that way, I’m kind of glad He’s not real . . . ”

“Gala honey, I’m trying to make you understand. We don’t believe in God because He’s real. Our God is real because we believe.”

All the while they talked, Gala and Esme drifted further out from Earth, until the moon was a stark eminence looming before them, dwarfing the distant Earth. They descended until the curvature of the barren satellite flattened out to fill half their view and dunes and craters rose up before them.

“Once, God existed, heard prayers, did miracles, punished wickedness and protected His faithful, and the world was in harmony . . . ”

“When He wasn’t flooding it and letting the Devil fuck shit up,” Gala put in.

Skimming over the face of the moon, they raced without a break in the conversation until the Earth fell beneath the horizon. On the “dark” side of the moon, they sprang out into the void again, homing in on a black morsel of meteorite suspended silhouetted by the sun.

“We’re well aware of your thoughts on the subject, dear,” Esme said with the barest scintilla of impatience. “He wasn’t perfect, but He was real, and a reflection of His people.”

“That’s cool, but like . . . Isn’t the definition of a god that they’re perfect? If they’re not, aren’t they just monsters?”

She watched the rock grow larger, blooming into an eccentrically crooked, barbell-shaped asteroid.

“Even so,” Esme said, “try to set aside your mistrust and rancor a moment. We’ve offered nothing but support for your project. Now, we humbly invite you to have a look at ours.”

“It’s a . . . really nice rock, don’t get me wrong . . . ”

“Look again.”

The asteroid seemed to glow with an inner light. Its blackened mineral surface became translucent, then transparent. Within it, suspended like a fossil in amber, was a colossal human form, a Michelangelo sculpture of a titan in a fetal pugilist’s stance.

“So that’s . . . your god?” You people never recovered from seeing 2001 on acid in the 60s, and it shows. Peering closer, she could still not make out any details. The huge, mephitic form seemed to blur or squirm out from under her attention like a ketamine hallucination, or maybe it just wasn’t finished.

“It’s everyone’s God, dear. God once incarnated and ordered the world because we believed in Him. The church fought heresy not to protect their own power, but to keep God alive.

“Every division, every doctrinal schism, weakened the deity until it faltered and failed, and the world was left in chaos. Look at the blighted nunnery where you were so shamefully mistreated. Every member of the sect indulged in their own private misconception of what God is and should be, and what did they accomplish?

Wow, so Magda wins the pool. “And this demiurge of yours, it’ll be god of the Hindus and the Muslims and Jews and everybody who, you know, doesn’t want a god?”

“Don’t look at me that way,” Esme said, which only raised more questions. “We don’t have a litmus test. We hail the saints of all religions. This God is a syncretic gestalt of what humans universally need in a supreme being. We’ve worked for over a century to refine it, and spent decades breathing it into existence. Now, we need only your vital spark to bring it to life.”

“Um . . . okay,” Gala said. “To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about all this . . . ” She didn’t feel it coming until she broke down crying. “Look . . . I’m just not good at this, okay? I answered a prayer the other day. I don’t even know why this is happening to me, but I tried . . . and this girl was about to kill herself. I tried to help her, but her life is so bad, I didn’t know what to tell her. I tried to be cool and level with her, but I fucked it up, Esme, and I don’t even know if she’s still alive or if she’s dead because I’m not even a halfway decent crisis counselor. So maybe I’m not the Chosen One you’re looking for.”

“Oh Gala,” Esme said, clucking her tongue across three hundred thousand miles of vacuum. “You did fine, sweetie. You made the effort. You helped her understand her choices, but you can’t beat yourself up for the choice she made. I only hope you see now why this is a dangerous path to walk alone.”

It was exactly what she needed to hear, and Gala wished she could have given that to Tamara Clugston, even if it was total bullshit. “I don’t feel like you’re hearing me, though. It doesn’t matter who it is. Nobody should be going around playing God! It’s a bad thing when you’re doing it figuratively, like health insurance or the death penalty, but this is the literal definition of that, for fuck’s sake.”

For a second, it almost sounded like Esme was over her shit. “I empathize with you, honey, but consider. You profess to be an atheist, yet you joined a nunnery. You struck out at religious pretenders and bravo to all of that, but what was it you truly wanted? What was the unspoken desire behind all your actions?”

“For people to stop being assholes?”

“For God to exist. A loving, just God. When He manifests as a living presence, the world will see that worship is not a leap of blind faith, and with you as the bearer of His message, it will come to love Him as He loves them.”

“That’s a lot to take in. I feel kind of put on the spot, here.” As it often did when pressed for a weighty decision, her mind went reeling away to the furthest corner of her lizard-brain to regroup.

They wanted her spark? Her nagging spark of doubt had become a brushfire, but she resisted the urge to shout NO, take her ball and go home. Maybe they were telling her the truth. Maybe, just this once, she was wrong. Buying time by making a show of studying the nascent God in its asteroid womb, she wrung out her brain in search of the source of her misgivings.

They say your senses take in so much stimuli that if your brain didn’t instantly forget most of it, you’d be paralyzed or hopelessly insane. Outside her body, without those perceptual filters, she must be taking in everything through her third eye, or whatever. Now she closed it and turned within herself, and rewound the tape.

Poring over the events of the day, she got stuck on something she could just as easily have missed in all the hullabaloo and mishegoss of being crowned the grain-queen of this secret sisterhood, only minutes before. It was so small, and so odd that she noticed it at all, but maybe an eidetic memory was just a happy side-effect of astral projection.

The pictures on the walls.

The one picture nearest the door to your room. You glanced at it going in and once more coming out, but with all those blue-haired acolytes fawning over you, there wasn’t time to process it.

The picture was of another gaggle of middle-aged women in white robes, smiling like they’d just taken second prize at a flower show. The one in the center had a halo of long, wavy brown hair, dark, penetrating eyes and a crooked, guarded smile. Those features looked achingly familiar . . . because she saw them every time she looked in a mirror . . . .

Whispering, “Enhance,” to herself as if she was cleaning up a grainy video image to crystal clarity to reveal a damning plot-point, she pulled that fleeting memory out and enlarged it until she could read the names beneath the picture. Sister Loretta—

“You know . . . ” Gretta said, “it’s funny, but you guys remind me of someone.”

“Who’s that, love?”

“Loretta Weisskopf,” she answered. “My grandmother.”

If it was possible for a bodiless psychic presence to do a double-take, Esme did so. “Of course! She was a stalwart in the initial visualization. This project is in your blood, Gala. You will fulfill it.”

“But like . . . my grandmother was a bit of a bitch. In fact, she was the one who convinced me religion was a bunch of selfish monsters trying to remake the world in their own image. It figures she’d be into something like this. This isn’t a God, it’s not even a Godzilla. This isn’t what the world needs . . . ”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, sweetie. Your grandmother spoke very highly of you. Tragically, your mother chose to waste her powers in attention-seeking, ego-driven pursuits. But you were always our great hope . . . ”

“Well, sorry to disappoint you . . . but I gotta go. This has been nice. Thanks for the pie!”

She tried to leave. She couldn’t. Held as if someone were clamping down on her arms, Gala struggled but was rooted to the point in empty space.

“What the hell are you doing to me?”

“This is all so much easier if you are a willing participant,” Esme said, “but it’s hardly necessary.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is sacrifice,” Gala said. “Back the fuck up, Esme.” Gala pushed with every joule of energy she possessed, but she stayed right where she was.

Stretching and bending, she could shift her perception towards Earth, the western hemisphere, North America, California, the San Francisco Bay, Angel Island and finally down to the Catherine wheel of candlelight in the center of which she still stood, but she viewed it as if through a telescope, powerless to reenter her body or stop it accepting the long, serrated bone handled knife.

Whoa, this can’t be good—

“Esme, stop it . . . ”

“We invoke thee, Gala Murowski, and bind thee to this vessel . . . ”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

On Earth, the sisterhood chanted, “We invoke thee . . . ”

Gala could only watch in horror as her right hand took the knife and began methodically to saw at the flesh of her left wrist.

“Fuck this shit! Fuck all of you! I don’t believe in your God, and I want to go home . . . ”

A shower of deep red blood fountained from her left wrist. Her left hand fluttered and spasmed but it took the knife and clumsily repeated the procedure on her right wrist.

She could not even speak as she watched her body stagger, drop the knife and lean against the cross, could only observe as she realized Esme had left her alone out here.

Down on Earth, Esme was stroking her hair, saying, “There, there,” like she’d just had a fainting spell, and she kept saying it and stroking Gala’s hair until she was lying on the ground. “Dear, you wouldn’t know God if you saw him. You just miss being young.”

When the body she’d always thought of as her other crappy car stopped breathing, she was not sucked up to Heaven or down to Hell, nor did she wink out of existence, but was instead dragged, leglessly kicking and silently screaming, into the murky depths of the asteroid, and the embryo of God.

12

To long for something outside, to penetrate to the heart of the mysterium tremendum, was all she ever wanted. Trembling and beating at the door to the next world all her life even as she denied its existence, because there was no home for her in this one.

Now she had been obliterated, blown out of her body and into an all-powerful incarnation of the world’s collective daddy-issues, and realized it was no different from the lamest jack-off day job she ever held down.

Now she was the Lord of Hosts, the alpha and omega, shaper of worlds, separator of light from darkness, water from land, man from dust.

She was a puppet.

On the morning after her miraculous ascent into heaven and accompanying compulsory suicide,  Gala stirred in her creche of dead star-stuff at the tugging of a hundred tiny disembodied hands. No snooze alarm to slap, no coffee to quicken her sleep-addled wits.

She tried to resist, but they dragged her new body out of its tomb and stretched it out until it was like an ethereal solar sail, a sheet of aluminum foil large enough to wrap up the moon. She could not so much as voice her displeasure as they seemed to rend her into countless glittering shreds and descend with them into the Earth’s atmosphere.

At 7:15 GMT, identical and synchronized manifestations of a humanoid entity standing a mile high and surrounded by a host of seraphim and cherubim manifested above every national capitol and major population center on Earth.

Not even the highest-definition images captured of the phenomenon could penetrate the diaphanous shroud of mist around it, or come to any agreement on the face, whose features fluidly scrambled between an estimated two hundred thousand distinctive visages, none of which matched any file in the world’s collected image databases.

“Be not afraid,” the terrifying giant spoke in a sonic boom of a voice, simultaneously in over 200 languages. “I am the Lord, author of your being. I have returned to proclaim a new age of miracles, but I command you to love each other as I love you, to abandon hatred, greed and violence, or be damned.”

As suddenly as it had appeared, the manifestations dissolved in glittering rays of light that shamed the sun, bolts of lightning spiraling up into the sky. Angels swooped and dove like UFOs before being sucked into the sky like sparks in His wake.

The world was, predictably, rather stirred up by this, and speculation on the extraordinary event in light of the previous few days’ events ran amok. The technology required for such a demonstration far exceeded human capacity, the media’s talking heads proclaimed, but that was no reason to accept divine agency behind such a brazen display.

One might credit the possibility of an otherworldly, advanced civilization attempting to manipulate us by way of our religious beliefs, before naively accepting anything so trite as an actual message from God.

Oddly, the world’s religious leaders remained conspicuously silent, while fringe cults and lay-busybodies strove to outdo each other with claims of secret knowledge or conspiracy theories. By the close of Thursday’s news cycle, the consensus seemed to be Probably Aliens, Maybe Actually God.

None of this was of any consolation to the average person in the street, who was by turns explosively gleeful and utterly unhinged, their minds running wild with unanswerable questions. The only answer was one that used to give solace, but now took on terrifying new meaning: It’s in God’s hands, now.

One big answer fell heavily on Friday morning when sectarian fighting in Kashmir, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela ground to a halt amid reports of systemic ammunition sabotage. Soldiers, police, freedom fighters, terrorists, militias and angry, disturbed white individuals everywhere found themselves shooting flowers at each other.

Images proliferated of men and women who should have been dead displaying poppies, carnations, roses and crocuses pinned to their uniforms in lieu of bullet-holes. Fairy-rings of assorted wildflowers bloomed on city streets where improvised explosive devices had been detonated.

Hostilities were awkwardly called off worldwide as investigations were launched, ordnance was inspected and uncontaminated munitions were hastily sought out and sold at staggering panic prices. Chinese occupation forces were forced to resort to tear gas and rocks to put down spontaneous revolts in re-education camps across Tibet.

By the end of the day, global media spin chased its tail in a cyclical debate between those who hailed God’s new hands-on approach and those who rebuked the supreme being’s forceful negation of free will with such stunts; the latter group was not eager to gloat when, on the morning after the disquieting holiday, all the bullets went back to killing people.

As thousands worldwide perished in the Flower-Gun TikTok Challenge, even the most passive observers had to ask themselves, Had God made a mistake, or was this stunt a passive-aggressive way of demonstrating His absolute power, while leaving humanity to save itself?

All but lost in the shuffle on the day God went public, an older Caucasian woman in a white robe and purple veil declared on a well-produced YouTube video that all of this had been prophesied. She also foretold the interruption of the world’s wars on the following day, and hinted at more and harsher miracles to come, if humanity didn’t awaken to the truth.

God’s reawakening was in response to the self-sacrifice of a troubled but saintly young Californian girl named Gala Murowski, who’d penned a poignant and prophetic diary that would soon be available for purchase, pending a three-way bidding war between the world’s largest publishing houses.

Gala could listen to them gnawing mindlessly at the ontological bones of the chaos she’d wrought if she wanted to. She could even hear them praying to her, feeding her fearful worship like coins in a collection plate, but she quickly got tired of it and tuned it out. An unborn fossil in her asteroid cocoon, she tumbled and marinated in doubt.

Retracing her steps didn’t get her anywhere, but it helped to pass the time.

1) She went looking for God and found nothing.

2) She went on a rampage against those who’d lied to her.

3) She became God, or some kind of god-golem cobbled together by a cabal of self-righteous old ladies hopped up on pop spirituality and blunt-force antidepressants.

And what had it cost her? Her life, her body, her sanity, because how could she deal with these things, even if they were really happening, and not go utterly out of her mind?

Her body, at least, she could live without. Her gangly, ectomorphic vessel of sufferation with its endless allergies, outbreaks, congenital defects and maddening fragility, was just a vehicle to convey her soul from one embarrassing heartbreak to the next, so she wouldn’t weep if she never found herself inside it again.

But to be this thing, this all-powerful monstrosity . . . clearly, the new season of her life she’d hoped to begin by entering the nunnery had already jumped the shark.

This new body didn’t have a belly-button, but it had a big floppy dong, what was that all about? It didn’t eat or excrete waste, it didn’t reproduce . . . Would it be more logical for a deity to have no genitalia, or both? To be a hermaphrodite, capable of the ultimate self-fulfillment, would be pretty cool, but even she wouldn’t want to see that in church. These women had baked their own repressed fantasies into their creator, which, behind the flickering masks it wore in public, looked more like Fabio than the author of all creation.

She hated all of it. The asteroid-prison, the public appearances, the angels . . .

She hated the angels worst of all.

The angels had been at her all morning, using her as a tool to tweak the world with a laundry list of Rube Goldberg miracles and signs and portents to stampede the human flock in the right direction. See Gala the Miracle Cow, Metaphysics’ Cruelest Mistake!

None of her suggestions, from abolishing plastics to letting her defend Earth from meteors and befriend all children as a giant flying turtle, got a moment’s consideration from the angels who milked her.

They looked like real old testament angels, with thousands of eyes and wings and hands bestowing blessings and brandishing swords all over them, but their heads were honeycombs with tiny, wizened librarian’s faces peering disapprovingly out of every pore, and their wings said, shhhhh, even in the vacuum of outer space.

When they finally left her alone, she found herself unable to stir from her prison, let alone snap her fingers to spontaneously combust every living rapist, though she could see and hear anyone at will.

So naturally, she spied on her exes.

She saw the ex-boyfriend who wouldn’t get off the fucking couch if it was on fire when they lived together, now working two jobs and racing home to cook dinner for his sick girlfriend.

This other one who could never talk about his feelings, pouring his heart out in a clanky, swooningly sincere song he wrote for a girl he’d only just met, played on a guitar he’d stolen from Gala’s mom’s houseboat.

The guy who knocked her up and couldn’t bother to hold her hand for the abortion tearfully singing a lullaby to a newborn baby in an incubator with tubes up its nose and down its throat.

She saw all of these and more until she couldn’t bear it. She realized that she’d hated them because they couldn’t put in the work to show they loved her, when she was offering nothing like love in return. She thought they were going to save her, and hated them for failing.

That was what she was missing, why the universe felt so hollow and empty, just like the world, just like her heart. She’d hoped as only someone who’d lost all other hope to find love, the thing they always said, without any evidence, that God was full of. To feel something touch her heart that couldn’t be ruined by a stupid boyfriend or the Fire, or a bunch of nutty nuns.

She’d never really felt it herself, aside from fleeting sparks of it when she was drunk and watching giant monster movies. She’d always known what was missing, but she blamed everyone but herself. Her absent father, narcissist mother, the aforementioned jerk-off boyfriends . . .

How was she supposed to love others when no one had ever really loved her? How was she supposed to feel something that the world had denied her, and that she’d come to suspect was just a conspiracy to sell dead flowers and gross chocolates and yoke people to each other so they’d be easier to control?

It was this issue that made her the perfect pawn (or whatever the pointy guys on either side of the king and queen were in chess). She was so powerful and so dangerous with her rampaging resentment and fuck-off attitude because she had no real connections to the world, nothing to anchor her when they transplanted her into this fucking abomination. In her loveless, unexamined bitterness, she was a perfect wrathful Old Testament sky-daddy.

But even if she didn’t know what love was, she was still way out in front of the angels holding her leash.

Physicists are saying the whole entire universe could well be one gigantic neural network, and all the stars just synapses in a brain.

Why would the ingenious author of all of this stomp around on one planet? Why would they get involved in the lives of the insignificant people on one infinitesimal speck of dust out of billions? Maybe they’re just busy being God somewhere else, but he’ll be back some day and we’d better be ready, right?

It was so tough not to end up stuck in the same insane rut that had trapped her captors and most of humankind, not to think of God as a reflection of us, or us as his defective, shameful offspring.

Even easier to see all of this as an accident, a botched simulation signifying nothing, destined to sputter out in universal heat-death, collapse and start all over again, only dumber. It set one free of any blame, any responsibility to try to fix it.

But if those dope-smoking physicists were right, maybe God was all of the stars, all of the void itself, and we were tiny but critical elements in its awakening.

Maybe the whole universe was alive but asleep, trying to wake up and get it right just once in the fleeting eons between bang and collapse, waiting for us to somehow initiate that transformation. Its awakening would be an unthinkable state-change for the whole universe, not a bunch of dumb theological pranks and special effects to coerce good behavior and sell books. Maybe she and these boomer grannies deserved each other. But maybe there was a way out.

Love.

If it was her job to fill the world with love, the world was in deep shit. She was a seething cauldron of Green Gargantua energy. She’d tried faking it for most of her life and knew it was futile. She couldn’t pretend long enough to buy her mom a decent Xmas present, so how could she fake it so hard that the universe resounded with the zinging of her broken heartstrings?

That was impossible, as impossible as finding eternal love with another haunted meat-sack. How could she unconditionally love a world of assholes? She could play the part she’d been cast in and say, okay, I fucked you up, stacked the deck against you from the beginning, so let’s start with a clean slate . . .

And then . . . what?

She hated all of her ex-boyfriend Eoin’s stupid superhero toys, but maybe it was because, for all their loud, dumb underwear-outside-the-pants he-man bullshit, they told the truth.

Take the Hulk, with whom she felt an uncomfortable kinship. Bruce Banner was a wallflower until he lost his temper, and the angrier he got, the stronger he got. So it was with Gala as a god, which was essentially an animal that fed on worship like mold feeds on bread.

The belief, the begging, the prayers flowed into her like air and sunlight, like Popeye’s spinach or stolen prescription meds. She thrived on it, grew more powerful and sure of herself. It was almost worth being imprisoned to feast on the world’s blind, idiot love.

And then it hit her. Something her mom told her once, when Gala asked why she never talked about Gala’s father. Didn’t they love each other at least a little, or at least more than once? You can’t love until you forgive. Mom was using it to rationalize being a cast-iron bitch, but she had a point.

And the Lord Gala looked down upon the face of the Earth and spake, I forgive you all. And then she repeated it, because she hadn’t even convinced herself.

No, you’ve got to mean it. God’s word isn’t so because they say it. It’s true because they speak the fucking truth. So make it true.

She looked down on the world and revisited her exes and forgave each of them in turn, from what quickly became a pretty rote script, because they all tended to run to a type, as did her breakups. I can’t hate you for not giving me what I couldn’t give you. We weren’t right for each other, and I hope you find what you’re looking for.

Eoin was caught red-handed masturbating over pictures of her taken the one time he convinced her to try cosplay in bed, as Phoenix from the X-Friends, or whatever. The only vaguely romantic thing he’d ever said to her was that he always crushed on Jean Gray because to him, the perfect girlfriend was someone who could read your mind and still love you. I forgive you for not being what I needed you to be, and for not being the superhero who could transform you into a functional adult. Whoever promised you that didn’t do you any favors.

She felt a weight lifted, and her ex seemed to feel it too. Tucking his penis in his Underoos and looking around shamefacedly, he saw with new eyes the toy dungeon which he’d accepted in lieu of a life outside.

Just then, the water heater burst and let loose a flood that would destroy his entire collection, but he would go on to spend the insurance check on a van and set out to see the world he’d neglected, and maybe even find someone special to share it with.

At St. Candy’s, Mother Mildred, Wanda and Galadriel watched The Masked Singer. Gala entered the television and caused the former NFL running back in the platypus costume to remove his head in the middle of “Please Come To Boston,” and address them in Gala’s voice. Mother Mildred licked her greasy bifocals clean and put them back on, then screamed.

“I forgive you ladies for not believing me, and then for locking me up when you did. I didn’t mean to cause all this trouble, and I didn’t mean to upset the safe space you’ve managed to find in the world. I didn’t appreciate your hospitality, and I resented you for not accepting me right away, and I am sorry for that. Do you accept my apology?”

“Will you get out of the television?” Wanda asked.

“That’s not in the spirit of an apology . . . ”

“We accept,” said at least two of them.

“To be honest, I thought you were all assholes, but I got jacked by some real industrial-grade assholes who have a secret lodge or whatever on Angel Island, and they made me kill myself, and they’re making me do all this shady god-shit. I know I wasn’t the best team-player, but I didn’t know how to ask for help. I’m asking you now as a sister, in the name of universal love and nothing more, to help me royally fuck their shit up.”

The TV turned itself off. The sisters looked sidewise at each other, each waiting for the others to speak. In the end, not one said a word, but none of them reached for the remote.

Gala embraced each of them with a healing wind that cleansed the entire nunnery of its persistent flea infestation and disintegrated the leaf-blower before making her last visitation.

She saw her mother sniffling over her third bottle of wine as the local news covered a candlelight vigil over Gala’s body lying in state at Marin City Hall, and reviewing the terms of a contract to ghostwrite Gala’s diary.

I forgive you, Mom. You got a bad hand, but you thought you were giving me better than you got. You’re probably convincing yourself even now that forging my diary is just your way to protect and nurture my aura, or whatever. I love you.

Mom spat her wine back into the brandy snifter she’d been guzzling from and looked around, then began crying in earnest. She hugged herself to catch the ghost of a scent of her daughter’s hair that had wafted through the room.

That was amazing, Gala thought as she returned, exhausted but exhilarated, to her womb. She’d just done that. She’d touched them all by forgiving them, by letting herself love them for what they were, not for what they could have or should have given her.

How stupid I’ve been, she thought, but she let it go. Love and forgiveness were a power unto themselves that she could have wielded like an archangel’s flaming sword all along. And these old women were powerless against it.

Now she was ready for the hard one. She could forgive, but did she deserve to be forgiven?

Far as she knew, she was all-powerful, but she still had no Internet access. But Google be damned, she had only to say the girl’s name, when she heard a voice praying. Though it was not her voice, it repeated that name, over and over.

A girl lay in a hospital bed surrounded by beeping machines. A man sat beside her, head down, hands throttling each other on his trembling knees. “Lord, I haven’t asked for much but I’m asking you to spare this girl. She’s not my blood, but she’s my heart. I was hard on her and I bear some fault for driving her to this, but she sat out all night waiting to talk to an angel which caused her flare-up, so maybe some of this is on you, too . . . ”

She drew nearer, close enough to hear the tears falling onto the sheets of the bed. “Tammy’s a good girl, she’s her mother’s only joy in this life, so you . . . you take care of her, and I’ll try to do better. I’ll try . . . ”

She leaned in close and whispered into his ear, “I will if you will.”

Time to go. Only a fleeting glimpse of the wondering, fearful look on his face as he searched the otherwise empty room, and she wondered if he heard the angels singing, their golden-throated voices ringing out through the stubborn void.

It was all she could do to return to her rocky cocoon before they came knocking. “We have some preliminary sketches for a nondenominational afterlife,” said the Archangel Esme, her prim compound-face of librarian faces simpering with seraphic self-satisfaction.

Esme, I forgive you, said the Lord Gala. I was lost and you thought you were saving the world the only way you know how when you did what you did. It’s some next-level twelve-issue crossover blockbuster shit, by the way, if you’d written it as a comic book and put Phoenix in it, my ex would have spank bank material to last a lifetime.

But I forgive you. And I love you.

Did the impact-scorched surface of her asteroid prison begin to crack just a little? No, that was just gas, which was weird, she’d never eaten anything, like it was Old Testament gas from when God used to eat those goats, what kind of asshole demands animal sacrifices and doesn’t literally eat them, anyway? I mean, who makes these rules, if not God?

Unmoved by the sweet wind of Gala’s forgiveness, Esme plowed on with the morning’s agenda. “We wouldn’t trouble you with it, but there is the question of Purgatory and/or Hell, and we thought we’d defer to you as an authority on how the young people today view eternal damnation as a lifestyle choice.”

GOD DAMN IT! Gala exclaimed. Her asteroid shattered and she floated free, backlit by a lens-flare-crazy corona of stardust. Thanks, Dad!

I love you . . . but I won’t be used, Gala proclaimed in a voice so powerful it crossed the empty space between them like gamma-ray sledgehammers. Esme recoiled, crushed into inert space debris by the concussive speech of the angry god she’d sat on several key steering committees to create.

And the Lord Gala looked down on the world and said, Let there be love, and she descended to the Earth like an extinction event on Valentine’s Day.

13

History destroys more than it preserves.

Think about it. That one fish that first walked out of the sea on lobe-fin legs. That one son of God who redeemed the world. That one cleric who posted his complaints about the Church and ushered in the Reformation, that one artist who instigated the Renaissance, that one hillbilly who invented rock and roll.

Is any of this true? Yes and no.

That one hypothetical fish was the most successful of countless mutants who set out to conquer the world beyond the waves. You couldn’t swing a lobe-finned fish anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago, without hitting a raging lunatic who professed to be the King of the Jews.

Even aberrant, evil local assholes like the Zodiac or the Golden State Killer turned out to be only the valedictorian of an invisible class of creeps who checked almost all the boxes, as if society was always grooming understudies, so badly did the monster need to happen. And Elvis wasn’t even the most gifted white redneck to steal rock and roll from the people who invented it.

What I’m trying to say is, the human need for saviors and innovators makes us pare down movements and epochal changes to make one person into their author, even if they weren’t the only ones doing what they did, even if they didn’t exist. Seldom, if ever, is one person more than just a figurehead for a change the world wants to make . . .

Until the day Gala Murowski returned to Earth in her final form.

An hour before dawn on Saturday morning, 4:47am PST, an unscheduled meteor shower lit up the murk above San Francisco Bay. Chunks of blazing metamorphic rock hammered the tranquil shallows into a steaming soup.

As Distant Early Warning networks lit up too late to do more than point a satellite or two at the deluge, a mass the size of the Chrysler building came tearing out of the starry darkness, shrieking a chain of supersonic booms as it tumbled towards the Bay Area with the force of five hundred Hiroshimas. Millions tumbled out of bed to run to their windows and watch in helpless terror as the flaming agent of their doom blocked out the moon, the sky . . .

Less than a thousand feet above Alcatraz, it braked in mid-air, the scream of its arrested descent rising to a thunderclap roar an impact that abolished every last trace of America’s most infamous prison.

Crouching amid the mushroom cloud of vaporized masonry, a shaggy, brown, apparently hermaphroditic gargantuan form emitted twin beams of blinding light that swept over the boiling bay and the steam-scoured sky before locking on the forested bluffs of Angel Island.

Tsunami waves radiated out from the guano-spattered rock to capsize fishing boats, waylay freighters and hurl commuter ferries out of the water. A pod of delinquent bottlenose dolphins, who were passing around an agitated puffer fish to get high off its tetrodotoxin emissions, watched as the fallen behemoth shook the dust off its towering form, drew itself to its full height and stepped off the demolished island.

They were immediately overcome by a sense of mission to found the world’s first delphine religion, and immediately began collecting rocks and shells to erect a shrine to the thing they fervently hoped had arrived at last to wipe humanity from the face of the earth.

Wading across the Tiburon Strait, the behemoth plowed through the chilly brine that swirled around her knobby knees and splashed at annoying helicopters circling round her head like winged leaf-blowers.

In the sauna at their retreat on Angel Island, Esme was already a shaking wreck. Draped in lavender-scented hot towels and sipping Sleepytime tea while a masseuse pummeled the knotted muscles of her back to jelly, she joined the sisters gathered around her in reciting the protective mantra.

“This house is surrounded by light,” she muttered, but she didn’t get any bolstering out of it. None of the energy that seemed to flow into her out of the earth and air yesterday came to her aid now. What had come of all their plans, all their service to humankind, in that short interval? What havoc had that godless little hood-rat wrought upon their divine mission?

You should’ve known better, she told herself. Loretta warned you her granddaughter was a lost cause, but you had to accept the hazard, because no more reliable vessel was presented by the universe. For one who believed that she was merely tuned in to the holy spirit’s eternal struggle to manifest itself for the highest good of all, it was a hard pill to swallow, that she might have been lost in a catastrophic ego-trip, all along.

The women around her went on invoking the saints of all religions to protect them from the abomination they’d unleashed. You weren’t there when she broke free, she bitterly thought. You didn’t feel it when she crushed my angelic body with a kind word.

That was what unnerved her the most, not that they had lost control so quickly, but that they had been unseated by the simplest of loopholes. The end, whatever unacceptable form it took, would not be long in coming. Esme had switched to ginseng even before Sister Priscilla barged in to report that the sky was on fire.

She felt the seismic rumble shoot up through the cedar floorboards to tickle the soles of her bare feet and stumbled to the doorway, shoving aside the others to hog the dubious shelter of the frame for herself.

As soon as the vibrations subsided, she shouted for order. “Maintain defensive prayer postures, sisters. That wasn’t an earthquake. It was something much worse.”

The assembled sisters squawked and clucked. Esme raised her hands for order to no effect, but a moment later, they all fell silent and looked to their leader.

Another rumbling wave surged beneath their feet. Fainter than the initial impact, but the next one was louder and more distinct, the third louder still, as if something enormous was making its way towards them.

Shivering, she let herself be dressed by her attendants. Esme pushed through the scrum of blue-haired penitents wailing and watching the sky. Something loomed over the whole island like a runaway skyscraper in the fog, but she knew by the slouching posture and nervous flinching as Coast Guard choppers darted around her head that it could only be her.

Very well, then. Let her come. Esme was not completely unprepared for this. To Sister Priscilla, she gave orders to bring the girl’s mortal remains out to the fire ring and prepare a rite of exorcism.

If she knew her mark, Gala wouldn’t just trample them underfoot. She couldn’t resist giving them a piece of her half-baked mind first, and might find herself less able to exert her divine will, than she thought.

The shapeless anger that drove her was also what kept her in check. The only way she could have slipped their grasp was an attack of agape, which would also prevent her from lashing out until it was too late.

The trick now was to keep her talking until the ritual could be completed. All of their work would be undone and the marketing campaign for The Galatine Prophecies (available NOW for pre-order in trade hardcover, Audible and Kindle, $39.95/$29.98/ $19.98) thrown into a cocked hat, but it was a small price to pay to save their own skins. Whatever plagues she visited upon them, they would regroup to purify their intent and begin again. And again, if necessary, until they got it right.

“Esme,” Gala said in a voice so intimate, she might have been whispering directly in the older woman’s ear. None of her sisters seemed to notice it. Esme’s hand went to her hearing aid just as it repeated itself louder, causing the device to whine with dissonant feedback like one of those awful electric guitar amplifiers. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” she mumbled into her concave chest. Holding out her arms, she donned a white robe and led the chattering host of sisters downstairs and out onto the cobblestone path to the grove, where the fire ring was already gushing tongues of flame around the coffin in which rested the body of Gala Murowski.

Esme took her place beside the fire and gestured to Sisters Priscilla and Ruth to expedite the ritual. “Gala, we’re on the verge of writing a new book of the Bible. We’re undoing all the evil that men have perpetrated on the earth. Don’t ruin that, the way you ruin everything else.”

“This new book of yours should do what, exactly, besides proving that women are just as awful as men, given half a chance? Listen, Mother Superior, I forgive you, but I’m not a doormat. Just because you tricked me into this thing doesn’t mean I’m down for knocking out whatever target you point me at.

“I mean, just from what you told me . . . When the world had real gods, how’d that work out? Seems like nothing really got better, until we got rid of them. If they didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent them? Well, someone had to destroy them all, too. Now you want to bring back devils? I’d actually love to see those plans for a heaven and hell. I bet you made all the same mistakes Hollywood reboots always make.”

“Why shouldn’t we? All those souls go into the dark. So much wasted energy. Every day, belief in our cause grows stronger, we gather more influence, more power to shape the world into what it should be . . . ” Keep talking, you spoiled little bitch. You’ll see what our hell is like from the inside. You’ll be our first customer . . .

“What you think it should be. You still have a landline so you can answer surveys. People like you kept five versions of Law & Order on the air for thirty years, but cancelled Firefly. You’ve never really suffered the way the people you want to judge have suffered. But the real reason you shouldn’t have this kind of power? Because you want it.”

“You have no idea how I’ve suffered,” Esme snarled, loud enough that the others paused the exorcism for fear the Mother Superior herself had become possessed. Lowering her voice and withdrawing to an alcove, she hissed, “How dare you presume to judge me, little girl. I have seen evil. I’ve been its victim in ways you could never imagine.”

“Great! Are you going to fix problems, or just punish the people who can’t obey your rules? You know how religious people always tell each other that atheists don’t really disbelieve in God, they just resent God because he wasn’t there when they needed him?”

“I’m not aware that they . . . ”

“Didn’t you see God’s Not Dead? I would’ve thought it was right up your alley.”

“I don’t watch commercial television—”

“Well as usual, you people have it backwards. You love God because you hate humanity for failing you, and you want God to punish everyone who wronged you, while the rest of the world just goes on like a vampire sucking its own blood.”

“Of course you know best, sweetie. How would you have it, then? All of us hanging on your every word, trying to make a better world for freaks and failures who blame everyone else for their problems . . . ”

“That’s where you’re wrong, sweetie. If there is a God, even a fake one, who controls everything, they are to blame for all the trouble in the world. But God is a verb, or fucking well should be . . . ”

Esme had heard enough. Plucking out her hearing aid, she shoved Priscilla aside, planted an Ariat custom leather riding boot against the side of the coffin and kicked it over, so its contents spilled into the fire.

The sisters averted their eyes. Esme squinted into the flames, her nostrils flared to drink in the reek of Gala’s flesh burning, but the stench was all wrong. It was the reek and poison smoke of plastic and foam rubber.

Esme could still hear the angry hornet buzz of Gala’s voice. She threw her hearing aid into the flames and edged closer to the fire-ring with her hand clamped over her mouth and nose.

“What the hell is that?” she demanded.

Choking on the fumes, Priscilla said, “Mother Superior, it appears to be a CPR practice dummy.”

Realizing she’d been outflanked by a vulgar girl and the gutter-nuns from Saint Candy’s, Esme tried to force the state of serenity that let her leave her body before the lanky apparition could crush them underfoot, but of course, it was easier said than done.

All of them fell down on their knees, awaiting the judgment they knew was coming, but the monstrous behemoth fell silent and still, its glowing eyes dimmed and dull.

A faint, receding tone chimed in Esme’s head, a voice she could barely resolve into words: I forgive me—

No sooner had it died than the amazing, colossal corpse began to spontaneously decay, emitting a gust of sweet, spicy wind redolent of cinnamon, cardamom and apple blossoms, and a storm of shrieking seagulls.

In the same breath with which she blessed providence for having delivered them, Esme looked up to the sky and let out a curse on Gala Murowski as the overstuffed seagulls cut loose with a deluge of guano as they fled the imminent collapse of the carrion-mountain, which tilted alarmingly and toppled out of the sky.

Esme trampled a different sister with every step she took in the direction of the limousine in the turnaround, but she got no closer to it than anyone else before the avalanche came pounding down to engulf Point Blunt and bury the sisterhood’s retreat under forty solid feet of potpourri-scented god-flesh.

14

And so passed the second age of miracles, and the brief, chaotic reign of Gala Murowski. When the world woke up on Sunday morning, it was with an exquisite mix of wonder and dread that it reached for its phone or newspaper or television remote, steeling itself for literally any fucking thing to be reported as commonplace truth.

And so it was with a deep sigh of mistrustful relief that the world learned that nothing much had changed. Wars were cautiously poking their heads out of their burrows and daring to hope for a return to senseless carnage.

Experts trotted out theories in varying degrees of insulting obtuseness to explain the mass hysteria that had come to a head with the plague of flowers and the kinky brown gargantua carcass washed ashore in San Francisco Bay, only to dissolve in a flurry of new age books consigned to the remainder bin almost before they could be printed.

Yes, everything had returned to normal.

Or had it?

Lost amid the flood of empty speculation were the odd little news items that percolated up every time the sun rose and the world turned. In China, feedlot and slaughterhouse workers walked off the job en masse and many were hospitalized claiming they were dying only minutes into their jobs processing poultry and pork. No pathogens or unsafe work conditions were identified, but even replacements were unable to bring themselves to shed a drop of animal blood for mortal terror that they themselves were the ones being slaughtered.

Miners stampeded out of diamond mine shafts in the Congo in a panic. They complained to company medics that they felt parasites boring around inside their bodies, but examinations failed to turn up any physical evidence. Nonetheless, the symptoms resumed the moment the miners returned to work, and operations were suspended.

Word of similar incidents at open pit copper mines in Nevada, rare earth extraction sites in Venezuela and logging operations in Brazil had begun to creep out past hastily imposed corporate media blackouts, galvanizing a global movement to recognize the personhood of the Earth itself. But those people were fucking crazy, and disregarded accordingly.

Only those who watched the sunsets and breathed deeply of the wind at evening time noticed how it smelled of cinnamon, cardamom and apple blossoms. No one who didn’t keep company with animals would note the difference in the nature of their play that began after the days of religious hysteria fell behind them.

Only those who listened and accepted with gratitude the little gifts young girls bring might notice the peculiar way in which they asked permission before picking each sacred wildflower.

My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step on the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now and it is all you need.

I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.

You are absolutely free to create in your life. Heaven or hell.

—Spinoza

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I'm exceedingly grateful to Matthew Revert, whose collage inspired the book you're holding; to Max Booth III and Lori Michelle for challenging me to write it; and to my parents for giving me refuge in which to complete it. Without these folks, this book would not exist at all, but if it's not all it ought to be, the blame rests solely with me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CODY GOODFELLOW has written nine novels and five collections, and has won three Wonderland Book Awards. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene films Stay At Home Dad and Baby Got Bass, which have become viral sensations on YouTube. He appeared in numerous short films, TV shows, music videos and commercials as research for his previous novel, Sleazeland. He also edits the hyperpulp zine Forbidden Futures. He “lives” in San Diego. Find out more at codygoodfellow.com.

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Table of Contents

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- About the Author