Has the World Ended Yet?

Casual Miracles

Casual

MIRACLES

Most of the people who wanted miracles found Zane through Craigslist. He had an ad he never took down in the Casual Miracles section. There was no other miracles section, but Zane wasn’t capable of other kinds anyway.

He’d been performing miracles for years, ever since the accident, so he was no longer surprised at what people wanted. The week before, a woman had called him to her house and asked him to change her locks. When Zane told her she needed a locksmith, she’d hugged herself and said it had to be done right now. The next day, a man messaged him a photo of rims he wanted for his truck. Zane messaged him back to let him know people only got one miracle. Was he sure that was what he wanted to spend it on? The man replied that the rims had been discontinued and he couldn’t find them anywhere.

Zane always performed the miracles. He’d learned early on not to judge. He charged extra for people like the man who wanted rims, though. But not the woman who wanted her locks changed. He figured she had her reasons.

Then there were the people he wanted to help, even though sometimes he couldn’t. The way the miracles ended for him was one of those situations.

It began like most of them did, with a text.

I’m looking for a miracle.

Who isn’t? Zane texted back.

The next text was just a street address. If Zane had looked it up first, maybe he wouldn’t have gone. But he didn’t bother to check it. He just got in his Corolla, which still had the dent of the woman in the hood, and followed the directions his phone gave him until it said he had arrived. The address was a low, long brick building surrounded by a small park with paved walking trails. A woman sat on a wooden bench in the park beside a man in a wheelchair with a blanket wrapped around his body. Both of them stared at Zane as he drove by, looking at the sign over the front doors of the building. New Peace Hospice.

Zane could have kept on driving. Maybe he should have kept on driving. But he was here. He parked on the street so the Corolla’s oil leak wouldn’t stain the hospice’s driveway or parking lot. He felt a place like this had to be respected. He checked the address again to make sure it was right and then went inside.

A woman stood in the lobby, watching him. She was pregnant and looked like she was going to give birth at any moment. She was running her hands over her belly when he walked in and she didn’t stop.

“You’re the angel,” she said. It was half question, half statement.

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Zane said. He didn’t like the name people used for miracle workers like him, but he understood why they used it. He’d long ago given up trying to get people to use some other word. He didn’t really know what to call himself, after all.

“We need you this way,” she said and turned to walk down a hall.

Zane looked around the lobby. A woman sat behind a reception counter, watching him. Past her was the entrance to a small cafeteria. A man sat alone at one of the tables, tethered to an oxygen tank. Classical music played somewhere, but Zane didn’t recognize it. He followed the woman down the hall. Most of the doors on either side were open, but he didn’t look inside them.

The woman led him to a room that looked like a hotel suite. There was a bed, a small table under the window, a dresser with a vase of dead flowers on it and a couple of chairs. A landscape of nowhere in particular hung over the bed. The bedside tables were covered in photos of young men, women and children. Pill bottles were scattered among the photos. An elderly woman lay in the bed, the blankets up to her chin. She took a long, shuddering breath every now and then. A middle-aged man in a suit sat in one of the chairs. He looked at Zane, then went back to looking at the woman in the bed.

The pregnant woman sat in the other chair while Zane stood at the foot of the bed. He looked down at the older woman, who took another ragged breath as he watched.

“I can’t save her life,” Zane said. “That’s not the kind of miracle I can do.”

He didn’t think it was the kind of miracle anyone could do. He’d never heard of it happening, anyway.

“We know,” the pregnant woman said. “The other angel told us the same thing.”

“What other angel?” Zane asked.

“The one who helped me,” she said and put her hands on her stomach.

The man in the chair looked at her, then back at the woman in the bed.

“Pregnancy is a life-and-death kind of thing,” Zane said. “I didn’t think that was possible.” It wasn’t supposed to be. That wasn’t how the miracles worked. Not that Zane had ever heard of, anyway.

“I didn’t think so, either,” the woman said. “But I had to try. She said it wouldn’t matter in the end.”

Zane looked at the woman’s swollen stomach. He wondered what it meant.

“Maybe you know her,” the woman said. She took her purse from the table and rooted around in it for a few seconds, then pulled out a phone in a flip case. She opened the case to reveal a photo of another woman with her hands on the pregnant woman’s stomach. It was taken before the pregnant woman was pregnant.

Zane stared at the photo. He recognized the angel in it.

“I keep her here to remind me of what’s possible,” the pregnant woman said. “I mean, it took a few years, so at first I thought it hadn’t worked. But now look at me.”

The man in the chair looked at her again and didn’t look away this time.

“How did you find her?” Zane asked. He knew the other angel didn’t have a Craigslist ad like him. He’d looked for one many times and never found anything.

“Our priest knows her,” the pregnant woman said. “We told him about our troubles and one day she was just sitting there in the pews after Mass.”

Zane turned his gaze back to the woman in the bed. It was all there in the room: birth, life, death. And the angel.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

The pregnant woman stepped to the edge of the bed and took one of the other woman’s hands in hers. It looked like she was lifting a stick.

“She’s never seen the baby,” she said. “She doesn’t even know I’m pregnant. She’s been asleep for months. I ... we want her to wake up. Just long enough to see.”

The man in the chair closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.

Zane nodded and put his hand on the woman’s shape under the blanket. He kept it there until he heard the sound of the miracle. He didn’t know how to describe it to people. It sounded like the buzz and squawk of the old modems they used back at the start of the computer days, only the electronic sounds were made by a chorus of human voices. The sound moved through him and then was gone. He pulled his hand back from the woman and nodded again.

“What do you want?” the pregnant woman asked, and Zane knew she meant payment. Nobody was ever really comfortable talking about it. Even Zane didn’t like to talk about it sometimes.

“Just tell me how to find your priest,” Zane said.

The pregnant woman tapped out something quickly on her phone and Zane felt his phone vibrate in his pocket when the message arrived. He didn’t look at it.

When the woman in the bed opened her eyes, Zane turned and left without another word.

The man in the cafeteria was still sitting there when Zane went back out into the lobby. The woman at the reception desk watched him go. It took him three tries to start the car, which wasn’t bad. He thought about driving home and pouring himself a drink, but he went to find the priest instead.

* * *

ZANE MET the angel Agnes Bath when she fell onto his car from an overpass.

He was driving his Corolla on the highway when the world suddenly split into pieces in front of him with a bang that he felt throughout his body. It took him a second to understand the world hadn’t come apart, that it was just his windshield cracking in several places. It took him another second to realize the cracks had been caused by the woman who had smashed down into the hood, as if she had fallen from the sky, although he thought right after that she must have fallen from the overpass he had just driven under.

He pulled over to the side of the road immediately, and by some small miracle all the other cars on the highway managed to avoid him. It was only when he put the car into park that he started to shake.

“God!” he said. “Jesus!”

That was when the woman on his hood sat up and looked at him through his cracked windshield. For some reason, she smiled despite the fact she must have been broken on the inside. He thought maybe she was a homeless woman or a junkie who had been trying to commit suicide even though she was wearing what looked like work clothes: a suit and a blouse, which was torn, presumably from the impact.

Zane got out of the car and reached for her, then held back. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do here. Would he injure her more if he moved her? He thought there was something about spinal cords or necks or something he had to be careful about. He wasn’t sure what his insurance covered.

“What can I do to help you?” he asked her, because he couldn’t think of what else to say.

“You already have,” she said. She reached out and took his hand. And that was the first time he heard the choir inside him.

It wasn’t like it was now. There wasn’t the shriek of voices that accompanied the miracles. It was more like a low hum that suddenly filled his body. He looked around, wondering where the sound was coming from, but didn’t see any other people. There was just passing cars.

“I’m Agnes,” the woman said, shaking his hand. “Agnes Bath.”

“I’m Zane,” Zane said, looking behind him to try to see who or what was causing the hum.

“I’m sorry, Zane,” Agnes said. “I want you to know that. I’m truly sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Zane asked. But Agnes had let go of his hand and was sliding off the hood of the car, leaving a dent behind in the shape of a body, arms outspread like sweeping wings. She walked away from him, along the shoulder of the highway. She lifted her hands up to the sky as she went and laughed.

“You’re probably not all right,” Zane called after her.

“I’ve never been better,” she called back.

He looked at his damaged car. “Who’s going to pay for this?” he asked, but there was no one to hear him.

The humming continued after he had driven home and poured himself a drink to stop the shaking. It was only in the silence of his apartment that he realized the sound was coming from inside of him.

He thought at first that it was just the stress from the accident, that it would fade with time like the shaking. But instead it kept growing. Then a low vibration joined the humming. He had a feeling like something was building inside of him wherever he went – the grocery store, the employment office, the community police office to report the incident with Agnes, where the cop he talked to nodded as he listened but didn’t write anything down. It was as if there was something inside him he didn’t understand that was trying to explode, in ways he didn’t understand. He couldn’t sleep at night, and he couldn’t think of anything else but how to make it stop. It was like puberty all over again. He needed some sort of release but he had no idea how to achieve it.

He drove back to the scene of the accident to try to understand. He parked on the shoulder right before the overpass and looked up at it, then at the grey sky beyond. There was a lone red helium balloon floating high overhead, but he wasn’t sure if it was a sign of anything or not. He got out of the Corolla and looked in the weeds growing at the side of the road, like there might be some clue there.

When Zane looked back at the road, a traffic jam had somehow formed in seconds. There were lines of cars ahead of him and behind him, filling the lanes. The cars stretched away in both directions as far as he could see. People sat in their cars and stared straight ahead or talked to themselves or shook their heads or swore or did the things you do when stuck in traffic.

Except for the man in the car beside Zane. He rolled down his window while still looking straight ahead.

“Do you know what’s happening?” he asked.

Zane shook his head. “I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t.”

“I would give anything for a way through this,” the man said, still not looking at Zane.

And that was when it happened.

The humming inside Zane suddenly swelled into the shrieking chorus of voices that he would learn to associate with the miracles. The pressure inside him suddenly broke, and he felt a great release, as if something he couldn’t see was flowing out of him and into the road.

And then the cars in front of the other man suddenly parted to either side, the drivers pulling to the left and right to open up a lane down the middle. The man laughed and drove forward into the open space the other drivers had created for him.

That was when Zane realized he was an angel.

* * *

THE NEW address the pregnant woman gave him was for a church. Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering. Zane thought it was an apt name, given that it took him forty-five minutes to get there because of road construction. While he drove, he thought about the time a different man had asked him to part traffic, although for the whole day in that case. He told Zane he wanted to feel what it was like to be important. Zane had granted him the miracle and hadn’t charged him anything.

The church was empty when Zane went inside, but it was lit up by candles everywhere. Zane sat in a pew and waited. He looked at the saints and angels in the stained glass windows that lined the walls and wondered if they had been people like him or if they had actually performed miracles that mattered.

After a time a man came through the sacristy door wearing black clerical clothing. He glanced around the church and looked surprised to see Zane sitting there. He nodded and then busied himself by bending down behind the pulpit to work on something. Zane got his attention by making all the candles in the church flare up for a few seconds, long enough that the priest straightened up at the pulpit and glanced around again to see what was happening. When the flames died back down, the priest looked at Zane.

“You could have just said hello or something,” he said.

“I’m trying to find a woman,” Zane said.

“This isn’t really the place for that.”

“Agnes Bath. She helped another woman get pregnant. I’m told you introduced them.”

The priest studied him for a moment without saying anything. Then he walked out from behind the pulpit and down the aisle, to sit in the pew across from Zane.

“I should have known you weren’t someone new looking for a little salvation,” he said.

“I could have been,” Zane said.

“You know, hardly anyone comes into the church these days.” The priest gazed around at the empty pews. “Not since all you miracle workers showed up.”

“Most people call us angels.”

“Well, I don’t,” the priest said. He looked at the Christ in the stained glass window at the back of the church, crucified in a broken rainbow. “But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? We all prayed for the angels to come back, but we got you instead. And you don’t make any difference at all.”

“I don’t tell people what miracles to ask for,” Zane said.

“No, but you show them miracles can’t really change anything. So why bother searching for God when he’s not going to help you anyway?”

“If anyone knows the answer to that, it should be you.”

The priest smiled a little but didn’t look away from the people in the windows. “What exactly do you want with Agnes?” he asked.

“I just want to find her and talk to her,” Zane said. “It’s a long story.”

“She’s easy enough to find, but I think you’ll have a hard time talking to her,” the priest said. “She’s in a cemetery now.”

Zane absorbed that in silence for a moment. “What happened to her?” he finally asked.

“I think you know what happened,” the priest said, looking back at him now.

“Which cemetery?”

“Eternal Garden. She said she wandered the grounds for a week and didn’t recognize any of the names there.”

Zane nodded and stood up. “What do you want?” he asked.

The priest laughed, a low, dry sound. “I want more people to come to church.”

“There are some miracles even I can’t manage,” Zane said. But he looked at the Christ in the stained glass long enough to hear the sound of the miracle, then walked out as blood started to trickle from the Christ’s wounds.

* * *

THE SKY had turned fiery with the setting sun by the time Zane reached the cemetery. There were no other cars in the parking lot, although there was a bouquet of flowers resting in one of the parking spaces. The gate to the cemetery grounds was locked for the evening, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that could stop someone like him.

Zane wandered the cemetery alone, like he was the last man left alive, until he found the grave of Agnes Bath. He looked down at the grave marker for several minutes, until he began to grow cold. It looked like all the other grave markers. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it the grave of just another person. But if he hadn’t known better, he wouldn’t have been here.

Zane knew he couldn’t resurrect Agnes. That was far beyond the power of a casual miracle. But perhaps there was another way to talk to her.

He reached down and put his hand on the grave marker until he heard the sound of the miracle moving through him. He looked around but didn’t see anything. He wondered if maybe his idea hadn’t worked after all.

Then Zane heard the sound of swearing coming from the earth underfoot. He stepped back just in time to watch the ghost of Agnes pull herself from the ground, like she was digging her way out even though the grass remained undisturbed. She dragged herself out on hands and knees, then pushed herself to her feet and brushed imaginary dirt from her limbs. She was as ethereal as Zane had always imagined a ghost – he could see right through her to the grave markers stretching away in rows until they disappeared in the deepening gloom.

Agnes didn’t look the way Zane remembered her, though. Her skin was drawn tight over the bones of her face and arms, and she looked more like a skeleton than a person. Zane realized his miracle had created a ghost of the Agnes that was in the grave, not the one who had been alive. Still, it was better than no miracle at all.

She looked at Zane and sighed. “What the hell do you want? I thought I was done with all this.”

“What happened to you?” Zane asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Agnes asked. “I died.”

“I thought we couldn’t die,” Zane said. “I’ve tried.”

“I know,” Agnes said, nodding. Her twisted hair fell over her face and she didn’t try to move it. “I tried for years after I got my powers. Once every few months at least. I just finally gave up. You can’t die as long as you’ve got the miracles in you. But the thing is there’s no ‘we.’ There was me with the power and then you with the power. Once I gave it to you, I could do anything I wanted. So here I am.”

Zane lifted his hand and put it through one of her arms for a couple of seconds, to see if he could. He didn’t feel anything, even though it was harder to see his hand on the other side of her. It was like looking through a thick fog.

“How did you give me the power?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Agnes said. “I just did.” She looked down at the ground. “Sorry about that.”

“I’ve tried to give it away,” Zane said. “With maybe dozens of people. I can’t figure out the trick to do it.”

“You have to find the right person.”

“How do you find the right person?” Zane asked.

“You just know,” Agnes said. “It’s like when you’re dating and you’re not expecting anything and then you go out one night to a bar to meet friends and your entire life changes. Maybe it changes for the better, maybe for the worse, but it changes.” She looked back up at him and brushed the hair from her eyes now. “Like when I saw you coming to save me. I knew you were the one.”

“I was just driving down the road and you jumped onto my car,” Zane said.

“It was like our eyes met across a crowded club.”

Zane looked at the graves all around them. He wondered if there were any other angels in the cemetery. He wondered if maybe someday he would get to die and be buried and forgotten in a place like this.

“That’s all you wanted to know?” Agnes asked. “You probably could have found everything I’ve told you on Google.”

“Did you hear the modem sound when you did miracles?” Zane asked.

“What modem sound?”

“Like an old computer modem. Only it’s made of human voices.”

“All I heard was someone breathing. At first I thought maybe it was God. But then I realized it sounded a lot like my ex-boyfriend. So I tried not to think about it too much.”

Zane didn’t know what to say to that. He rubbed his face with his hands and stared up at the sky. This wasn’t going like he had expected. He wasn’t even sure what he wanted from her. His phone vibrated in his pocket but he ignored it.

“Is this all you raised me from the dead for?” Agnes asked. “It hardly seems worth it.”

“How do you do a real miracle?” Zane asked, still gazing up at the sky.

“What do you mean, ‘a real miracle’?”

“Something life or death, something that matters.”

“If I had known how to do that, I’d probably still be alive and you’d be wandering around as just another person,” she said. “I don’t think anyone knows how to do a real miracle. Maybe not even God, if he exists.”

“You made the baby,” Zane said.

“What are you going on about now?” Agnes asked. “Are you all right? Maybe you should be talking to a therapist, not me.”

“The woman who wanted to have a baby but couldn’t. The priest sent you to her.”

“Oh, her. That was nothing. No different than dyeing someone’s hair or showing them a photo of the life they could have had with that past lover.”

“You helped her to have a baby,” Zane said. “You made a life. That’s a real miracle, not fixing someone’s car.”

“Is that what you think?” Agnes asked.

Zane looked back at her. “I’ve never been able to do anything life or death like that.”

“No, I mean you think the baby is actually going to live?” Agnes asked. She shook her head. “It’s just another casual miracle. That woman’s life won’t be any different a year from now.”

Zane stared at her as he finally understood. Agnes looked back at him with her dead eyes. The phone in his pocket buzzed again.

“Are you going to get that?” Agnes asked.

Zane took out the phone and looked at it. There was a series of text messages waiting. They all said the same thing. HELP! He scrolled through them until he saw the older message that told him who they were from. It was the pregnant woman.

“I guess you’ll be going now,” Agnes said. “I’d like to say it was nice to see you again, but ...”

Zane stared at the messages for several seconds, not sure what he should do. Another one arrived as he stood there.

WE’RE AT THE HOSPITAL! HELP!

He turned and started back toward the car. He wasn’t sure if the ghost of Agnes had been real or if he had just imagined her because it was what he wanted.

“You won’t be able to do anything,” Agnes said as she sank back into the grave. “None of us can do anything.”

* * *

ZANE DROVE to the hospital and left the car in the parking lot without paying. There was no time. He went in through the ER entrance and walked past all the people staring at the television and floor and ceiling as they waited, and went up to the nurse behind the reception desk.

“You have a woman losing a baby here,” he said.

“We have a lot of women who lose babies here,” the nurse said, not looking away from her computer.

“I’ve come to help,” Zane said.

“Are you family? Or a doctor?” the nurse asked. She glanced at him and then back at her computer. “You don’t look like a doctor.”

“I’m an angel.”

“That baby is going to need more than your little miracles.” The nurse hit the keys on her keyboard hard as she typed. “We all are.”

“I’m the only hope the baby has,” Zane said. “We both know the doctors can’t save it.”

The nurse looked at him again and this time didn’t look away. There was blood in one of her eyes from who knew what.

“I can give you your own miracle,” Zane said. “No charge.”

The nurse didn’t seem to move but a door opened beside the reception desk. The nurse nodded at the open doorway. “She’s in the first private room after the trauma beds.”

Zane went through the door and down the hallway beyond. The hall was lined with beds. A young boy wearing an oxygen mask sat on one with his mother, watching something on her phone. They both looked up at him hopefully as Zane walked past, and he looked away. He didn’t meet the eyes of the elderly man with the shaking legs in the next bed, or the teen girl with the b****y arms in the bed after that. He didn’t meet the eyes of the nurses or doctors or any of the other patients as he walked through the ER and to the row of private rooms on the other side. He opened the first door and stepped into the room, ignoring the nurse who called after him from somewhere amid the trauma beds.

The pregnant woman was alone in the room. She lay on a bed surrounded by machines. She was attached to the machines by wires stuck to her head and stomach. Her stomach was otherwise bare, except it was covered in some sort of gel. The machines were all sounding alarms. The woman was crying as she held her hands to her stomach.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she saw Zane standing there. “I know you can’t help. I know that’s not how the miracles work. But I don’t ...” She turned her head to the wall for a few seconds, then looked back down at her stomach.

“They’re going to bring him out,” she said. “They say it’s his only chance.”

“They won’t be able to save him,” Zane said.

The woman nodded like she understood. “So that’s why the other angel was able to help me,” she said. “Because she knew. She knew this would happen. It wouldn’t matter in the end.”

Zane went over to stand at her side. He looked down at her stomach. He was hoping to see the baby move, to see some sign of life, but there was nothing. The machines kept up their alarms.

The woman looked up at him. “There’s a rainbow around your head. Is that a halo?”

“That’s the drugs they put you on,” Zane said. He knew he had never done anything to deserve a halo.

“You can’t do anything, can you?” the woman asked. “None of you can.”

Zane didn’t answer her. Instead, he put his hand on the woman’s stomach. The gel was sticky and warm under his fingers. He could feel the woman’s breathing, maybe even a heartbeat.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

But he did know. He knew this was the one. And then he felt something push against his hand from inside the woman’s stomach. The baby. Maybe a hand or maybe a foot. The baby was reaching out to touch him.

“No one can die when they have the miracles inside them,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” the woman asked. “What are you doing to my baby?” She tried to sit up, but she was tangled in the cords from all the machines.

The sound of the miracle rose inside of Zane, and this time the chorus of voices was the loudest it had ever been, like every person on earth was a part of it.

“It’s all right,” he said as he pushed back against the baby’s hand or foot, whatever it was, even though he wasn’t really sure whom he was talking to. “Everything is going to be all right.”