It’s the furnace, running full-blast. The blower pumping hot air into the ducts. The gas burner chugging. The furnace that Mr. Whittier destroyed.

 

 Somebody’s fixed it.

 

 From somewhere in the dark, a cat screams, just one time.

 

 Something needs to happen. So we start down the wood stairs with Mr. Whittier’s body.

 

 All of us sweating. Wasting even more energy in this impossible new heat.

 

 Following the body down, into the dark, Mother Nature says, “What do you know about wearing wigs?” With the stumps of both hands, her diamond ring flashing, she twists the gray wig around on her head, saying to Reverend Godless, “A big lug like you, what do you know about a vintage Christian Lacroix anything?”

 

 And the Reverend Godless says, “A Lacroix tulip-skirt bustle?” He says, “You’d be surprised.”

 

  

 

 Babble

 

 A Poem About Reverend Godless

 

 “Until Genesis, chapter eleven,” says the Reverend Godless, “we had no war.”

 

 Until God set us to fight each other, for the rest of human history.

 

 

 Reverend Godless onstage, his eyebrows are plucked and shaped

 

Into twin-penciled arches, with, underneath each,

 

 a rainbow of sparkle eye shadow in shades from red to green.

 

 And on one bare bicep muscle, bulging,

 

 below the spaghetti strap of a red-sequined evening gown,

 

 tattooed there is a skull face with, under the chin, these words:

 

 Death Before Dishonor.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

 

 A travelogue that shows churches, mosques, and temples.

 

 Religious leaders in jeweled robes

 

 waving to crowds from bulletproofed town cars.

 

 Reverend Godless, he says, “On a plain in the land of Shinar, all people toiled together.”

 

 All humanity with a shared vision,

 

 a great noble dream they worked side by side to fulfill

 

 in this time before armies and weapons and battles.

 

 Then God looked down to see their tower, the people’s shared dream,

 

 inching up, just a little too close for comfort.

 

 And God said, “Behold, they are one people . . . and this is only the beginning

 

 of what they will do . . . Nothing that they propose to do

 

 will now be impossible for them . . .”

 

 His words, in His Bible. The Book of Genesis, chapter eleven.

 

 

 “So our God,” says Reverend Godless, his bare arms and calf muscles stippled

 

 with the black marks of a shaved hair growing back in each pore,

 

 he says, “Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race

 

 across the face of the earth,

 

 and shattered their language to keep His children apart.”

 

 

 Part female impersonator, part retired U.S. Marine, the Reverend Godless,

 

 sparkling in his red sequins, says,

 

 “An almighty God this insecure?”

 

 Who pits his children against each other, to keep them weak.

 

 He says, “This is the God we’re supposed to worship?”

 

  

 

 Punch Drunk

 

 A Story by the Reverend Godless

 

 Webber looks around, his face pushed out of shape, one cheekbone lower than the other. One of his eyes is just a milk-white ball pinched in the red-black swelling under his brow. His lips, Webber’s lips are split so deep in the middle he’s got four lips instead of two. Inside all those lips, you can’t see a single tooth left.

 

 Webber looks around the jet’s cabin, the white leather on the walls, the bird’s-eye maple varnished to a mirror shine.

 

 Webber looks at the drink in his hand, the ice hardly melted in the blast of the air conditioning. He says, too loud on account of his hearing loss, he almost shouts, “Where we at?”

 

 They’re in a Gulfstream G550, the nicest private jet you can charter, Flint says. Then Flint digs two fingers into a pants pocket and hands something across the aisle to Webber. A little white pill. “Swallow this,” Flint says. “And drink your drink, we’re almost there.”

 

 “Almost where?” Webber says, and he drinks the pill down.

 

 He’s still twisted around to see the white leather club chairs that recline and swivel. The white carpet. The bird’s-eye maple tables, polished until they look wet. The white suede couches that line the cabin. The matching little throw cushions. The magazines, each one big as a movie poster, calledElite Traveler,with a cover price of fifty dollars. The 24-carat gold-plated cup holders and the faucets in the bathroom. The galley with its espresso machine and halogen light bouncing bright off the lead-crystal glassware. The microwave and fridge and ice machine. All this flying along at fifty-one thousand feet, Mach zero-point-eight-eight, somewhere above the Mediterranean Sea. All of them drinking Scotch whiskey. All of this nicer than anything you’ll ever be inside. Anything short of a casket.

 

 Webber’s nose, he tilts his drink back, sticks his big red-potato nose into the cold air, and you can see up inside each nostril. See how they don’t really go anywhere, not anymore. But Webber says, “What’s that smell?”

 

 And Flint sniffs and says, “Doesammonium nitratering a bell?”