Mark Rogers: The Dead

And the Last Judgment, Gary? He asked himself. Looking forward to that?

The food went tasteless in his mouth.

Of course, maybe you don’t need to. Maybe you’ve already been there . Memories of last night’s dream flooded into his mind with an almost hallucinatory vividness.

You have been weighed in the balance and found-

“Jesus,” Gary said, putting the sandwich down. What in hell was going on with his subconscious? Two horrific nightmares in two nights-it was really out of character.

And then there was the weird side of it. Even though he didn’t believe in clairvoyance, it was hard to accept that the first dream and his father’s death had been mere coincidence. Telepathy was nonsense-but he and Linda had shared that second nightmare, he was sure of it. It was all too much, and he did not want to think about it.

To distract himself, he grabbed a copy of Time magazine out of the drysink. It fell open to a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction piece about a coalition of fundamentalists and neanderthal Catholics who had discovered that the Antichrist had arrived in the person of Harrison Foldsbury, an undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Education; Foldsbury had narrowly escaped death in a commando-style raid on his home, apparently organized by the above-mentioned loonies. But the wildest twist of all was a connection between the nut jobs and Israeli Intelligence; there was some reason to believe that some of the fanatics had been trained near the Dead Sea at a top-secret base.

Gary finished the story feeling a nasty mixture of black amusement and anxiety. These washed-in-the-blood morons and their Spanish Inquisition cohorts were so bizarre that you just had to laugh, even if they were trying to kill people, even if the Mossad (acting on some no-doubt Byzantine motive) took them seriously enough to train. But the story, with its wacked-out apocalyptic overtones, didn’t help at all to distract him from memories of the Last Judgment…

“Last Judgment dream, ” Gary corrected himself. His stomach crawled; he was definitely not going to eat the rest of his sandwich, though that made him feel a little guilty. Waste not, want not , he could hear his mother saying.

I’ll put it in the fridge, ma, he thought. Finish it later.

He got up, wrapped it in foil and stashed it. After doing his dishes like a good boy, he went down the stairs to the rec-room.

Max was down there as Gary had guessed, doing Marine-style pump-and-clap push-ups in front of the Today Show. He was wearing sweat-pants but no shirt; Gary, who was rather powerfully built himself, felt his usual twinge of envy at the sight of his brother’s physique. Where did the bastard get that muscle-tone?

“Hundred eighty,” Max was saying. “Hundred eighty-one…” He stopped at two hundred, rolled onto his side, and propped his head up on one hand, smiling at Gary with his usual brotherly disdain before blowing the sweat from his upper lip. His cheeks and chin were bluish with stubble.

“Hey dork,” he said. “What’s up?”

“You are, I see,” Gary answered.

“Family curse,” Max said.

“How’s Jane Pauley?”

“Real foxy, as always. Shame to waste her on that Trudeau turd.”

“Any big news?”

“Yeah. Local story, too.”

“What?”

“Plane crash. Off Bayside Shores.” Bayside Shores lay immediately south of Bayside Point.

“Jetliner?”

“747, bound to Philly from Madrid. Two hundred and eighty Italian tourists aboard.”

“Whoa,” Gary said. “Wait’ll Linda hears about this. You know how she hates flying? She’s going to this conference in August, and-”

“Shh,” Max said, sitting up, nodding toward the TV. “They’re talking about it now.”

“… The survival of twenty-four passengers has been called ‘absolutely miraculous’ by a Coast Guard spokesman,” Jane Pauley was saying. “At least seventy are known dead, with the rest given little hope. An emergency morgue has been set up in a high school gym in nearby Bayside Point…”

“Bayside High?” Gary said. “My alma mater? Things like this just don’t happen around here.”

“Lot of strange shit going on,” Max said. “You feel that earthquake last night?”

“Yeah. They mention it on the news?”

Max nodded. “Half an hour ago-” He paused. Ms. Pauley was staring at her TelePrompTer.

“This just in,” she said. “We’ve received word of two more air disasters, one at Atlanta International, the other at Chicago’s O’Hare…”

“Three crashes in one day?” Max asked. “Are the towel-heads on the warpath?”

But if that was the case, La Pauley gave no clues. Information was still sketchy. More would follow shortly. She went on to a story about a rash of disappearances in Washington D.C. and New York City.

“Think they’ll talk about the earthquake again?” Gary asked.

“Don’t know,” Max said. “With all these planes dropping out of the sky, it’s going to be pretty lukewarm stuff.”

Gary was silent for a few moments. “You know, this is going to sound crazy, but were you dreaming about anything? Just before the quake woke you?”

Max looked at him. “As a matter of fact, yeah. But what’s so strange about that?”

“What were you dreaming about?”

Max looked uncomfortable. “What’s it to you?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Well, since you’re being so polite… the Last Judgment.”

Gary’s nape-hairs rose.

“What’s the matter?” Max asked, and laughed. “You should see your face.”

“I had the same dream, “ Gary answered. “At exactly the same time. Me and Linda both.”

Max snorted at him. “Stop busting my chops.”

“The quake woke you just as your sentence was going to be pronounced, right?”

Max nodded.

Gary continued: “‘You have been weighed in the balance and found-’“

“And then the bed start shaking,” Max broke in, nodding again, looking mystified.

“Of course, you believe in the Last Judgment and all that stuff.”

“I never believed it’d happen at three o’clock on a Tuesday morning,” Max answered. “Ditto for the rest of my life. I may be a Catholic, but I’m not a barbarian.”

“So what do you think about the dream?”

“I think it was just that.”

“One that you and me and Linda all shared,” Gary said.

“So what does that tell us? Nothing to found a religion on.”

“ Is there anything to found a religion on?”

“Want to argue about it?”

Gary put his hands up. “I’m not feeling very masochistic this morning, thank you. “

“I wonder if Mom had the dream?” Max asked. “Haven’t heard her moving around upstairs. Guess she isn’t up yet.”

They looked back at the TV. The Today Show was experiencing a spectacular burst of technical difficulties, the most astonishing being a complete rearrangement of Gene Shalit’s face.

“Improvement,” Max said.

Long about eleven Gary grew uneasy because Mom hadn’t appeared yet, and went and knocked on her door.

“Mom?” he asked.

No answer.

He knocked again. Max came up behind him.

“Maybe we’d better take a look,” Max said.

Gary opened the door. The bed was empty.

“Mom?” he asked, going in and looking around. She was nowhere to be seen.

Gary went over to the bed. It had been slept in; the covers showed ample evidence of that. But when had Mom gotten up?

“Must’ve gone out early,” Max said. “ Real early…” He didn’t sound too confident of this hypothesis.