Saint Joan of New York by Mark Alpert

Author:Mark Alpert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030325534
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Chapter Sixteen

The police car cruised down Second Avenue. The driver’s eyes gazed at me from the rearview mirror. “Want me to turn on the air conditioning? You look like you’re hot.”

If I were in the car with a real cop and he’d asked me the same question, I would’ve probably said, “Yeah, sure, turn it on.” I was still sweating from my sprint down the street, and the back of the car was pretty warm. But I didn’t say a word. I was stunned and disoriented and very, very confused. The man driving the police car wasn’t really a cop. He wasn’t even a man.

He was the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He was the Rock of Ages, the Light of the World. He was the divine being who’d shown me the Theory of Everything.

He was God.

And yet he looked like an ordinary middle-aged New Yorker, an overweight, overworked guy from Flatbush or Canarsie or one of the other Brooklyn neighborhoods. He was like someone you might see eating a hot dog and carrying a beach chair on the Coney Island boardwalk. Or like one of those scruffy, noisy baseball fans who sit in the cheap seats at Yankee Stadium and bellow, “You suck!” at the home-plate umpire.

The air conditioning came on. The driver could hear my thoughts.

“So how are you doing, Joan? You’ve been busy since the last time we talked, huh?”

The question was infuriatingly casual. Given the agonies I’d endured over the past 48 hours, his nonchalance was almost insulting. This God was so different from what I’d expected, so unlike all the descriptions in the Bible and all the paintings and sculptures in church. The sight of him didn’t fill me with wonder. I didn’t sense his overpowering goodness or his all-encompassing love. He was too normal, too human. Not awe-inspiring at all. I was more annoyed than awed.

My disappointment was so intense that I started to wonder again if the whole thing was a hallucination. This can’t be right. Maybe I went over the edge when the cop arrested me. Maybe I’m having another breakdown.

He let out a sigh as he steered to the rightmost lane of Second Avenue. Then he made a right turn onto Houston Street, which had practically no traffic.

“I don’t blame you for being annoyed. Or confused. I get it, it’s disturbing. To see God up close? In the flesh, so to speak?” He looked at me in the rearview. “It throws you off balance, right?”

That was the understatement of the millennium. But I kept my mouth shut and looked out the backseat window. I stared at the dark streets and shuttered stores while he talked.

“I gotta give you credit, though. Even with all the confusion, you’ve done a great job so far. You noticed the clue I gave you last time, the picture of the extra dimensions, and that wasn’t easy to spot. I mean, I knew you were smart, but I wasn’t sure how quickly you’d figure out the theory.”

I suppose this was meant to be a compliment, but it just made me angrier.

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