Jack Cavanaugh - Death Watch

“Oh, no!” Billy cried. “God didn’t hand Satan the power of life and death. God is and always will be the giver of life.”

“But people are dying!”

Her emotions rose to the surface as she said this. She couldn’t help it. Cheryl and Hunz and Josh were dying!

“All men die, Sydney,” Billy said. “The only thing that has changed is the timing.”

“So you’re telling me there’s no hope.”

Billy’s face became radiant. “With God there’s always hope, Sydney! That’s the whole point. This time Satan didn’t accuse one good man; he accused God of delaying the end of days needlessly, that Christians no longer believe in the power of salvation, that God’s grand plan had proven itself a failure, that even if a Christian knew his neighbor was dying, he’d do nothing to save him, I mean truly save him, for all eternity. And so God said to Satan, ‘All right, do your worst. Only for every death watch notice you give, you must inform two Christians.’”

Sydney’s reporter senses quickened. “Two notices? Anything else?”

“The death watch notice has to be delivered in some form of printed content with an accompanying verbal contact.”

Billy knew about the confirmation!

“You’re saying there’s no way to break the death watch cycle?”

“Of course there is. God is the source of life. Not just for eternity, but for the present.”

This was unreal. Sydney stared at him. He’d tossed a lifeline in her direction and she wanted to grab it, no matter how improbable, even though her mind, her reporter’s instinct, told her it was an illusion.

She remembered the colored picture of Joseph and his multicolored coat her Sunday school teacher would hold up while telling a Bible story about him and his brothers. She remembered the flannel-graph figures of Jesus and a boy and his lunch of loaves and fish which they fed to five thousand people on a hillside. What was she supposed to do? Use flannel-graph figures on the evening news?

But then, put a scientist on the ledge and have him tell her how he developed a microscopic search-and-destroy submarine that was smaller than a human hair and that could hunt down and neutralize nanobots that had been injected into a person’s bloodstream, and she’d rush to the cameras, wouldn’t she?

You ‘ve bought into a closed system based solely on measurable phenomenon. If you can’t see it, or measure it, or understand it, it doesn’t exist.

Was it so inconceivable that the realm of the spirit could affect life and death? Was human existence solely physical, affected only by the realm of science?

“So if someone who has received a death watch notice,” Sydney said, “if that person is led to God . ”

“The death watch contract would be broken,” Billy said.

“As easy as that?”

“You should know there’s nothing easy about salvation. If you’ve forgotten that, you need to read the gospel tract you were given at the mission.”

He knew about that too? Sydney felt her pocket. The tract was still there.

“An angel told you?”

Billy laughed. “No. I know Lony. He doesn’t let anyone leave the mission without giving them a gospel tract.”

Sydney wanted to believe. More than anything she wanted to believe. It made sense, didn’t it? Or had this street preacher just tapped into her Midwestern culture and sold her a bottle of snake oil?

“Can you really talk to angels?”

Billy looked at the pictures on his clothes. “I chose pictures that look like them, because after a while the image fades in my mind.”

He bent down and reached inside the shoe box.

“This one’s my favorite.”

He pulled out a ceramic angel, its white wings flashing in the bright lights.

Billy started to straighten up. His foot slipped. His arms waved. To keep from falling, he had to grab the ledge, releasing the angel. It flew over the side of the building.

Below, there were screams.

Billy caught himself, but the angel tumbled for ten stories, smashing to smithereens on the sidewalk. Billy looked down at the white remains of his favorite angel. He was shaking.

“Oh, this is crazy. This is crazy,” he said. “I put the pictures on me to remind myself that I have angels watching over me. I’m scared to death of heights. Oh, this is crazy.”

Sydney held out her hand. “Then come down,” she said. “Why did you climb up there in the first place?”

“We had to get your attention.”

We. Again with the we. Despite his obvious sincerity, and his story—well, the jury was still out on that one—it was the speaking in plural that made him sound like an insane man.

“Well, you got it. I’m here. Committing suicide doesn’t do much for your credibility.”

“I’m not a suicide.” He said it most emphatically.

“Then prove it. You’ve delivered your message. Your work is done. Now you can come down.”

Billy thought about that. “Yeah. I like that. I’ve done what they asked me to do, haven’t I?”

He started to get down.

Behind her, in the darkness, Sydney could hear the shuffling of feet in gravel. The instant Billy’s foot stepped down off the ledge, they’d grab him.

But Billy didn’t step down. He cocked his head. Listened. Then he straightened himself and turned, facing the deadly side of the ledge. He looked straight ahead, toward the runway.

As he stood there, his face changed. His cheeks, which had been quick to ball up into a laugh, fell; as did his jaw. He blinked several times. His eyes glassed over with tears. He nodded, almost imperceptibly, but Sydney saw it.

He hung his head.

“Billy?”

For several moments he stood there, wind whipping, cold. He shivered. Shuffling his feet, he turned his head to Sydney.

“You go,” he said.

“Billy, take my hand. I’ll help you down.”

“I don’t think so. I need to hang around here a little while longer.”

He spoke with somber resolve like someone who had just received disturbing news.

“It’s the angels, isn’t it? Billy, did an angel just speak to you?”

Sydney scanned the air in front of him and saw nothing.

“Billy?”

“Take the shoe box,” he said. “There’s another angel in it. It’s broken, but I want you to have it. The Bible too. The front pages, the blank ones. I wrote everything down I just told you on them. Maybe it’ll help.”

“Billy, step down from the ledge. I have someone I want you to meet. Someone with a death watch notice. You can tell him what you told me. He’ll listen to you. In fact, let me put you on the air. Let me interview you. You can tell everyone. The networks will pick it up. We even have connections with EuroNet. Let me help you get your message out.”

But Billy was no longer listening to her. He stood straight, his face into the night, his toes over the edge.

“Billy!”

A pair of hands grabbed Sydney’s shoulders from behind, pulling her away. She wrenched free, grabbing the Nike shoe box.

Then there were more hands with stronger grips and Sydney St. James was escorted off the roof of the Hilton Hotel.

Sydney St. James stepped from the hotel lobby. As she did, she turned and looked up. They hadn’t grabbed Billy yet. He was still on the ledge, staring off into the distance.

A mob of reporters on the opposite side, cordoned off by the police, shouted questions at her.

“What did he say to you?”

“Did he tell you why he was going to jump?”

“Did you try to talk him out of jumping?”

Sydney wanted to shout back at them that Billy wasn’t a suicide jumper, but now she wasn’t so sure. Something changed up there. One minute it was happy Billy, positive-preacher Billy, God-has-everything-under-control Billy. The next thing she knew, Billy was wearing the expression of a condemned man and his toes were curled over the ledge.