Revelations

When pressed, Gerald Kramer would concede that living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape was “something else”. Then he would mention his daughter's twelve game winning streak in the house Scrabble tournament, and how his son was really becoming something at the guitar, and have you tried his wife's pancakes? And before you could say “post-rapture permanent midnight”, any chances at a substantial discussion would have evaporated like a drop of water in the lake of lava that used to be North Dakota.

Back in the early days, those first few weeks before all social structure crumbled, people talked. They said Gerald was in denial. They said he was being irresponsible, that he was putting his family at risk by refusing to confront these particularly unpleasant truths. But then, there tends to be a disparity between what people say and what really is. Gerald knew this well.

It had been exactly six months since the rapture. Most of the surviving class had lost track of days after the sun blotted out, but the combination of a battery-operated alarm clock and a Far Side novelty calender allowed Gerald to maintain a specific sense of time. This helped. And so he maintained a schedule. He would go to bed with Francine every night by 10:00, and he would snap awake every morning by 6:25. For the first few days, he would still able to wake up to “Bob and Brody In the Morning”, as neither Bob nor Brody ever really had a chance at ascending. But on the third day both of the irascible DJs were consumed by some unknown hell-beast mid-broadcast, and Gerald had to switch to the standard buzz alarm. He found it to be distasteful but preferable to dead air. The Anti-Christ's AM propaganda station (666 “The Pentagram”) was thoroughly out of the question.

After whispering for Francine to go back to sleep, he would pick up the twelve-gauge shotgun , one of the three possessions his father had left him, and peer between the boards covering his bedroom window. If the demons weren't prowling, he would then go outside and check on the zucchini.

Most of the Kramer family garden had withered with the sun, as science would dictate. But, for reasons that would confound the few remaining botanists, the zucchini actually thrived under these hellish conditions. Most speculation attributed this anomaly to a cruel joke on the part of the Anti-Christ; however, there was never any confirmation on the issue. Gerald had heard an alternate theory, that this was a sign that God still had a hand in the lives of the remainders, that there may in fact be an opportunity for redemption. He had dismissed it without a second thought.

He would retreat with his harvest, taking the collection of bulbous vegetables to the basement. He would place it next to the generator, humming just enough power for him to make a hot breakfast with one of the sacks of instant-pancake from the last grocery store raid. He could never get them to be quite as crisp and golden as Francine, but he had improved upon months of practice.

And so Gerald would make his imperfect pancakes. He would wake up Francine and the children – who had grown to hate the lumpy breakfast disks as much as the unnecessary wake-up call – and he would sit them down around the dinner table, filling up four of the five chairs. He would try and make them discuss banalities for half an hour, and he would motor one-sided conversations through his children's resentment, all the while maintaining a stifling air of positivity. These mornings were his happiest moments.

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Six Months Earlier (The Light and The Taking)

When reports of Tibetan monk Sakya Dorje's ascension first reached Western media, they were largely greeted with skepticism. Still, the story was enough of a novelty to earn mention on most websites by 9:00 AM Eastern time. Witnesses at the monastery reported to seeing the man “swallowed up in a fountain of light” and “drifting into the sky, as if carried by a gentle wind”. Reader comments on the CNN online article ranged from the tongue-in-cheek (“Well, that's one way to solve an overpopulation problem”) to the incomprehensible (“WHY CNN SPREADING CHINESE PROPGANDA? TYPICAL LAME STREAM MEDIA. GET OUT OF OBAMA'S POCKET!”), but very few expressed any foresight into the events to come.

There may have been any number of ascensions between Dorje's and Charles Beckett's, but the rapture of the genial Seattle homeless man is what caught the world's attention, as it was the first report with video accompaniment. As he manned his usual corner between 4th and Madison, Beckett began to glow, as though a lantern burned just behind his sternum. A small crowd gathered, most assuming it to be part of a particularly impressive street performance. However, it wasn't worthy of most cell-phone cameras until Beckett began to levitate. The majority of the videos were of questionable quality, but the image of the the ragged man rising and deteriorating into something blinding and pure was striking enough to shake even the most faithless. This sparked the first acknowledgment that something larger could be at work.

Just as the video of Beckett went viral, more reports began streaming in. An even clearer video surfaced in France, this one of an entire nursery full of newborns slipping through the ceiling as they transcended material and physics. It was around this time that most networks interrupted their standard programming for “Rapture Watch”, “End Times With Christiane Amanpour”, and “Reckoning Live” respectively. CNN was the last network to concede the beginning of the end of days, as it tried to remain as balanced as possible out of respect to its less religious viewers. However when an atheist talking-head was Taken during a live interview in The Situation Room – much to a miffed Wolf Blitzer's chagrin – CNN unveiled its “Apocalypse Now!” graphic, which they had secretly been working on for the previous hour.

Having lost the race for the first in-studio rapture, every other network began trying to procure as many holy-men as possible in the interest of catching up. This was more difficult than it may sound, as most of the holy-men in question felt a responsibility to stay with their now overflowing churches, synagogues, and temples. Catholic priests in particular faced logistical difficulties in the final hours, as even the most moderately faithful suddenly took a strong interest in obtaining a confession. While lines stretched by the hundreds, it soon became clear that there was a strong interest in trying to choose the least pious priest, as dozens waited for hours only to have their priest of choice ascend before they could obtain the sacrament.

Muddying the situation even further was the disturbing fact that there did not seem to be any particular pattern to those chosen. Every faith, every race, and every sexual orientation had been Taken. For those who believed that they were taking the only path to salvation, this was quite a disappointment. “I understand the Lord works in mysterious ways, but I do have to question his judgment, if this in fact a rapture,” one of ABC's resident evangelicals opined. Doubt about the legitimacy of the rapture spread among those nervously left behind. Questions were raised. Did they have any confirmation that this was the work of God and not Satan? Did we know for sure that God wasn't taking the sinners and leaving the pure to live in a heaven on Earth?

But as the infants continued to be Taken and the rapists and murderers continued to be left behind, this possibility became increasingly unlikely. As time progressed, despite a irrationally defiant few (“I wouldn't want to be raptured by the God of the gays and the Muslims anyway,” was a sentiment drummed up by more than a few man-on-the-street interviews), a consensus began to emerge. Those that were rising were going to heaven – or at least something like it. And those that were left behind...well, you just didn't want to be left behind.

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Even though everything else may have been shattered and broken, Gerald Kramer maintained his position as head-of-household without much dissidence. Francine had a quiet resignation about her ever since the Taking and showed no interest in taking any position of responsibility. So Gerald had taken it upon himself to lead this broken branch of his family tree, to find ways to fill their time as they remained trapped in their quiet suburban home.

He had decided from the start that he would not be content with having his family survive; he wanted them to live. So, under Gerald's direction, Cody worked at teaching himself guitar with the old acoustic Jaimie had requested and abandoned within a 2 week period. He made Jaimie try her hand at art, continuing to force her through with it even after her first sculpture turned out to be a graphic depiction of male genitalia. He wanted them to develop a passion, something to live for. Gerald had already found his own, even if it was 18 years too late.

On this day 6 months after The Taking, Gerald sent his children to their tasks and watched Francine lie down and re-read one of those romance novels she apparently had a taste for. Satisfied with everything in its proper place, he settled down with a book of crossword puzzles. He began delving into one of the half-filled out ones, trying to recall facts that he very well may have never known. As he reclined in his easy chair and tried to decide what a good name would be for “German Composer _______ Harkenberger”, he noticed that the background music created by his son had faded out. Gerald stopped making up believable 7 letter German names that began with A and made his way up the stairs.

Cody was lying flat on his back, the guitar leaning abandoned against his bed-side table.

“Heya bud, why don't you get back to practicing? It'd be a shame to give up just when you were getting the hang of it.”

Nothing.

“Seriously Cody, get back to practicing.”

Still nothing.

“Cody. I'm not going to ask you another time.”

Cody finally looked up at his father.

“I can't do this anymore dad,” his voice betrayed a weariness.

“Sure you can, you just have to pick it up and you'll –"

“I mean this pretending. Like everything's okay. We're living in hell, everything's not okay. I don't know when you're finally going to realize it, but everything is so far from okay Dad.”

“You think I don't know that?” Gerald's voice softened.

“Well, you don't act like it. Things are so different Dad, and I'm tired of pretending that they're not. I'm just really, really tired.”

It hit Gerald all at once. The realization of how delicate everything was, everything he had created over the past several months. He had been doing so much to try and make things right, and he had lost himself in these efforts. Lost himself so much that he never stopped to marvel at the fragility of it all. But now, faced with it, it was almost overwhelming. This balance could crumble any second, and every inflection in Cody's voice screamed that he was on the brink of failure.

Gerald took a seat on Cody's bed.

“Don't think for a second that I don't know where we are. And I know this has to be tough. But I need you to understand, this is all we've got. I mean, this is really it.”

He put his hand on his son's shoulder. It was awkward rather than comforting, a reflection on his lack of practice.

“Look Cody, I'm gonna be honest with you. I don't think we've got anything to look forward to, no redemption or anything like that. So then all we've got is what we have right now. And it might not be much, but it's something. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Gerald looked closely at his boy and could that he did. It was a truth too obvious for words.

“Then you'll understand why I want you to play,” Gerald handed him the guitar. Cody looked at it for a long second before sitting up and taking it. Gerald began to leave the room, a little more drained than when he entered.

“Hey Dad?” Cody said, his weariness replaced with a strained earnestness.

“Yeah?”

“Why do you think Megan – ”

“Do not say that name.”

Gerald's response was cutting and final. He walked back down the stairs. An amateurish interpretation of Oasis's “Wonderwall” rang down the hallway behind him.

__________________________________________________

Gerald was not optimistic driving home after being released early due to end-times. He had made his living helping a less-than-honest company maintain less-than-honest accounting practices, and he was long past rationalizing it. Despite all of the internal justifications that had allowed him to live this particular life for the 20 years prior, Gerald knew. If this was the time when the righteous were to be separated from the wicked, there would need to be a great deal of leniency for him to come out on the side of the light. And so he listened to Bob and Brody riff on the apocalypse, as the normal DJ for the afternoon drive had been Taken earlier.

“I'm terrified Brody.”

“Why's that Bob?”

“Haven't you heard? Everyone's talking about this raptor thing”

(Stock animal roar sound effect)

“Bob, I think they're saying rapture. Not raptor.

“Rapture? Really? Psh, I thought there was something to worry about for a second.”

“I'm with you buddy. The world's gonna be way more fun once all us sinners get it to ourselves.”

“Amen brother!”

(Stock angelic “Alleluia” noise)

When Gerald walked through the door, he wasn't surprised to see Francine still there. He knew about her affairs. Not in a concrete sort of way, but rather in the way of a truth is so self-evident that it doesn't need to be seen or spoken of. And while he tacitly approved of her fooling around – he had stopped truly caring about her years ago and had already philandered when his work schedule allowed it – he imagined that it was the sort of thing that wouldn't open many doors when push came to rapture. Maybe if she had something else to her credit, some kind of love or charity, she would have a chance. But Gerald doubted anything was there. It was another one of those self-evident truths.

“The kids?”

“Upstairs.” she said, cigarette in hand. He had thought she had quit sometime last year.

“All of them?”

“Yep.”

“Christ,” he exhaled, running his hand through his hair. He had thought there would be hope for them. They weren't perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. But they would've had plenty of time to redeem themselves, sometime down the road. He and Francine, they had their chance. But the kids, well, they only were just starting. This was quite the unfair apocalypse.

“It's not over yet,” she said quietly.

They both sat down in the living room, occupying the same space, but still worlds apart. Words weren't really necessary; everything that could be said was already understood. Gerald absentmindedly turned on the TV. Fox News had shifted their coverage to “Fox and Friends”, where all three hosts still sat uncomfortably in their chairs as a particularly down-trodden looking theologian outlined his thoughts at what the future would hold for those left behind.

(“Well, Gretchen, there are a number of possibilities. Needless to say, this is rather uncharted territory. But if Christian theology holds up, we may have to contend with a reign of hell on earth from the Anti-Christ. Now this reign could last anywhere from 5 months to 2000 years. The specifics are a definitely less than clear. Now we may not get an Anti-Christ; that parts all conjecture on my part. But given existing scripture and how events have transpired so far, I'd say a hell on Earth situation is almost a certainty.”

“Hey, I understand, you're supposed to be an expert on this, but who's to say what's going to happen,” the blonde haired man in the center of the group said behind an uncertain smile. “I mean, what's this definition of hell anyway? Maybe hell is just being stuck here. For instance, there's nothing stopping us from running this very program tomorrow, so there's no reason to think that things will be radically – ”

He stopped as he looked to the couch on his left, where Gretchen had a look of pure elation on her face.

“Gretchen?”

“I feel....light.”

Her body began to flicker beneath the artificial florescence.

“Oh you've got to be kidding me!” The blond haired man stood up and walked away in exasperation. Gretchen began to be levitate over the couch. The theologian and the one remaining host shifted awkwardly.)

Gerald turned off the TV. He looked over at Francine who had been staring at an unremarkable spot on the wall for the past 10 minutes. She broke the silence.

“We really messed things up didn't we?”

Gerald didn't respond.

__________________________________________________

Gerald returned to his puzzle and pondered whether Alberto could be a German name. He leaned back and chose to pencil it in just to see what would happen. None of the letters were that helpful, but it was something. That was all he needed.

“That was good.”

He looked up to Francine. Even with all the time alone together, they still were far from casual conversationalists.

“What?”

“What you told Cody. You weren't exactly quiet about it.”

“Oh yeah. Uhm, thanks.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Which part?”

“The part about how we don't have any chance for redemption.”

Gerald tried to read her face. Their years living apart in the same house had eaten away at his ability to puzzle out what her thoughts.

“I guess. I don't have a reason not to, you know.”

“I guess.” She looked back down for a minute, although her eyes weren't moving with the words. She spoke up again, apparently having considered her words and finding them worth saying.

“You should let them talk about Megan.”

“I am not having this discussion,” Gerald snapped.

“You can't run away from it.”

“But I don't have to run into it.”

He ended the sentence curtly, making it clear that this was as far as he was willing to go. Francine tried to pry him away from his crossword with her eyes. She didn't succeed.

__________________________________________________

It was around ten o'clock, and the kids were in bed. Gerald doubted that they were sleeping, but he didn't want them down with him anyway, not until he had processed this. The news stations were shifting their perspective from breaking news to a post-rapture analysis. Ever since the “Pope Watch” had ended with his-holiness's rapture – much to the relief of the remaining Catholics – they had begun to run low on easy coverage. The reports were coming in scatter-shot now, and it appeared that the bulk of The Taking was over. CNN still had quite a few statisticians remaining, and they estimated more than half of the population had been Taken. As they did a demographic analysis, Gerald drifted.

His family was in the bad half. All of them. He had always considered parental victory to be just keeping them fed and off the streets, but obviously the goal-posts had been moved. He hadn't been able to keep his kids out of a hell on Earth, hadn't been able to make them worthy of salvation. That was a failure too bald-faced to avoid.

As Gerald considered the situation, he began to see a bittersweet sort of happiness evolving. He still had his family. Yes, that was terrible, but at the same time, he had a chance to make things right, to a degree. He had a chance to care for them as he should have from the beginning. In short, Gerald had something to live for, even after everything else was taken away. It wasn't much. But it was something. And that was all Gerald needed.

Later Gerald would never be sure when he closed his eyes. But he would always remember when he opened them. The time was 11:03 on the digital clock beneath the TV, and there was a light piercing through his eyelids. He shook off the initial disorientation to place where it was coming from. Upstairs.

The stairs flew beneath his feet and he ripped open Megan's door to see his seven year old daughter, engulfed in a brightness more beautiful than anything his imagination had conjured in his 41 years. She was slipping upward, her eyes still closed from a sleep so restful. Her body, always tiny in his arms, now became one with the air, rising with its currents. As she drifted toward the window, the room erupted in a phosphorescent whiteness that was simultaneously blinding and intangible. Gerald swam through the light to the window, where his little girl was more than halfway through.

“NO!” He roared. Her eyes might have fluttered. But it could have been a trick of the light.

“MEGAN!”

He tried to grab at her feet but they went were beyond his touch; he was grabbing at a dust that wouldn't even care to stain his fingers. Gerald Kramer fell to his knees as he watched her ascend like a balloon that slips out of a child's hands. He wept.

“Please. I need her. I know this is good for her, I know this is what she needs. But I need her.”

Gerald knelt by the window for the remainder of the night, waiting for a reply. It never came.

__________________________________________________

“Andreas,” Gerald said to himself, snapping his fingers in time with the epiphany. It made sense and the “N” worked for “European Border Maker”, which had to be Danube. He wasn't sure where that bit of information came from. He remembered reading somewhere that Plato believed people were born with all of the knowledge in the world. They just need it drawn out of them.

He looked up at Francine reading her book and listened to Cody butcher a Led Zeppelin song. “A Stairway to Heaven”. It was a little on the nose, but Gerald smiled in spite of himself. Later he would check in on Jaime's art. She had moved away from the phallic and sculptures entirely. Instead she made landscapes. Her last one was of this melancholy willow tree dripping its branches over a lake bluer than anything he could remember.

Afterward, Gerald Kramer would check his calender, which was on the Far Side cartoon where a dog tries to trick a cat into crawling inside of a dryer. He would laugh and realize it had been six months since he had started living in this post-apocalyptic hellscape.

It was something else.