Stretch

One day, on his way to work, on the train, Raymond realized the Rapture had happened. At first, it only looked like two or three people disappeared; his train was mostly still full. Then, he looked through the windows between train cars and saw that the neighboring car—one that was no doubt full for rush hour last he checked—was half empty, maybe more. People were standing there and then they were not. No puff of smoke, no bright light, nothing. It was like turning off a television, losing reception, cutting a signal.

Raymond’s first concern was the train operator. He all but expected this L train to whip around the next corner, off the tracks, sending the cars careening into the perplexed street below. But the train slowed into a turn, the operator clearly a sinner and likely unaware that the Rapture just occurred.

There was confusion on the train, some of the more sensitive types getting tears in their eyes, even crying outright in burst of sobs, but for the most part it was peaceful. Raymond made eye contact with a stranger sitting across the way, but they didn’t say anything, following the standard social cues of no small talk on the train during rush hour, cues established long before the Christians were gathered.

After four or five minutes, Raymond heard someone on the other end of the train speak up, to another stranger. “Do you think that was it?” she asked.

“Must’ve been,” the stranger, a man, responded. “You religious?”

“Used to be.”

And more silence as Raymond turned to stare out the window, peering down at the streets. The honking levels quickly rose, as empty cars had spun into trees or run into each other or simply rested idly at level stop lights. A few people were dripping out of their homes, some more emotional than others, but the majority simply drove around the empty cars or continued past the frightened people, onward to work, like avoiding physical exchanges with homeless, ill peddlers.

“Should we all do something?” one gentleman shouted to the remainder of Raymond’s train car.

“What can we do?” a woman shouted back. “We’re here. They’re not.”

By then, riders began realizing they might know Christians who were gathered and began making phone calls, calls that grew increasingly fervent, worrisome, tearful and bordering on furious. Raymond thought about checking in on his mom, but there was no doubt she was still around. She used to volunteer at an abortion clinic and uses God’s name in vain more often than not.

Raymond had some acquaintances, a couple closer friends, and some coworkers who may have been gathered, but he’d take them as they came. Sooner or later, you’d all find out who was gathered, and who wasn’t.

* * * * *

The Chicago Loop was still bustling, maybe boasting a few less suited men with briefcases and heeled women with stern looks, and Raymond proceeded to work as always, on the tenth floor of a Michigan Avenue high-rise. It wasn’t his usual doorman.

The talk of the elevator was an L train that did crash, killing 10, on the Pink Line. Raymond was strangely relieved that it wasn’t the Brown or Blue Lines, with their atheistic hipsters, urban students and jaded city dwellers whose livelihoods were squashed in the economic downturn. The damage would have been greater if no one in the derailed train had already vanished in the Rapture.

No one mentioned planes dropping from the sky or space shuttles careening into the earth, so the damage may have only been slight. But it was still early, Raymond thought, and the reports would surely start coming in.

“Good morning, Linda,” he said to the blonde at the front desk of his accounting firm, who ignored him, on the phone with a bloodshot stare. He grabbed a copy of the Red Eye off her counter.

He set his briefcase on his desk and looked around the office. So far, it was as expected: the good, the best, the best of the best, all missing. Raymond’s friends, at their neighboring cubicles, were already in.

“Can you believe this?” Raymond said, because what else could he?

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Mike said, at the desk to the right.

“It’s pretty sad,” said Lisa, to the left. “Families being separated and all that. We should all probably go home and assess the damage, figure things out, regroup for tomorrow.”

“Nah,” said Raymond. “We’d all just end up watching TV. Life goes on.”

Raymond took off his jacket, hung it on the back of his chair as always and sat down, booting up his computer. “Is Jack in?”

His boss, Jack, would surely be in. Jack: the lying, cheating, womanizing, obscene pseudo-agnostic, with a brilliant mind for numbers. He could be the spokesperson for those not gathered, if they ever needed one.

“Not yet,” said Lisa. “He’s usually early. Maybe someone close to him disappeared. Or not. He could just be late.”

Raymond began working diligently. He had a big meeting at 3 p.m.

* * * * *

As the day grew onward, no one had heard from Jack. He wasn’t picking up his phone, its voicemail box quickly filling. It was as if he vanished with the others.

He couldn’t have, Raymond was positive, not with the good people. Not if there was any truth to the Rapture.

To take his mind off of it, Raymond turned to CNN and their live web updates. Small tragedies came to light across the globe. A baseball team’s bus plowed into a guardrail on the highway and capsized. Several surgeons left the operating table mid-surgery. One airplane was harshly landed by a flight attendant with only injuries, albeit some severe. A construction site building a church in Atlanta suffered a string of accidents, with several deaths after multiple gatherings. That’s what the news decided to call them, when people were taken—gatherings.

There was more space to stretch in the break room, and the refrigerator wasn’t bursting at the seams. Raymond didn’t mind that so much.

When it hit 3 p.m. and Jack still wasn’t there, and the meeting had to be put off until he was, Raymond became concerned. It was clear that his new worst fears had been realized: Jack was gathered and Raymond wasn’t. The motherfucker who once hit on a woman in a wedding dress is living the good life.

“Do you guys seriously think Jack made it?” he asked.

“Probably,” said Lisa. “I mean, we haven’t heard from him. Maybe he was one of those secret Christians. Like MC Hammer.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he made it and we didn’t?” Raymond scoffed back.

“Doesn’t matter much now,” said Mike. “Unless there’s going to be another round of gatherings.”

Raymond stood up. He grabbed his briefcase, slammed it closed, and draped his jacket over his arm. He reached for his hat, too, but he didn’t wear one today, or ever.

“I can’t believe that,” said Raymond. “I’m going to find him. I’m going to go out there and get Jack. I’m sure he’s at home, sitting on his ass, pretending he cares about all the stuff that’s happening out there.”

As Raymond turned to leave on his spiteful voyage, he noted Lisa and Mike shrugging at one another, and then returning to the Martin account, one of the big ones.

* * * * *

There was a strange, somber mood as Raymond passed fellow wanderers. Most kept their chins down, staring at the sidewalk, not too different than usual. It turned out global happenings did not necessarily bring those who remained together.

Raymond felt a cold breeze on the nape of his neck, colder than usual, especially for spring. Jack lived in a condo just north of the Loop, so Raymond had to cross the Chicago River, green from pollution and sewage of past years. There was a boat in the middle, bobbing in the water, unmoving, presumably unmanned. It was hours since the Rapture, so Raymond assumed it was either a Christian cruise or a few of the many remaining Chicagoans who needed to be alone with their thoughts, and their failure.

Raymond hadn’t walked to Jack’s place in nearly two years, when he was invited over for a baby shower in the guise of an important, expectantly mandatory work function. It was around the same time of year, but outside it was warmer, and more lively, but crowded and smellier. At the shower, Jack was pretending to not be as happy as he was, a faux cynicism to maintain a tough-guy facade. In actuality, the attempt made him appear to be even more of a dick in real life than anyone had anticipated.

At the next corner Raymond passed, a man with a microphone stood on a milk crate, shouting that the end times were upon them, and that Jesus had returned to gather his followers and destroy what remained. The man waved a Bible in his other hand, but triumphantly. It appeared strange to Raymond and likely to all those who knew what just happened that morning: this man’s Bible a key that apparently didn’t open the right lock.

* * * * *

Raymond always remembered Jack’s building as a den of activity, where the elite shuffled about at all hours, somehow, probably because they all achieved higher earning levels and lifestyles than the 40-hour workers. The activity was still there, just more somber, with a few extra homeless people thrown in the mix, clearly after wandering aimlessly, confused, but now less angry than in the morning.

He buzzed unit 305 in the lobby and waited for Jack’s voice, and waited, and waited some more, for no voice.

“Damn it!” Raymond screamed. He turned. If Jack wasn’t enjoying his day off doing nothing, he had to have been in some other country, or spiritual realm.

Jack’s wife Rachel didn’t even notice Raymond as she flew past him with her key out in the lobby, on her cell phone, screaming. “I don’t know, Karen! I really don’t know!”

“Rachel!” Raymond yelled, as he couldn’t let her leave. Connecting with someone felt like a rarer feat to him all of a sudden.

Rachel turned and froze. “I have to go, Karen,” and hung up her phone. She thrust forward, grabbing Raymond by the lapels of his jacket. “Have you seen him? Have you seen Jack?”

Raymond shook his head. Rachel pushed him away and stared at the ground.

She kicked the floor. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I don’t remember your name.”

“Ray.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’m going to go upstairs and check the machine. Maybe he left a message.”

Rachel fumbled for her keys without looking up and inserted them into the door.

“Was he gathered?” Raymond asked.

“If he was, it must have been mistaken identity,” replied Rachel.

“Let’s keep looking then,” said Raymond.

Pausing and breathing, Rachel then removed her keys from the door and fumbled them back into her pocket. She turned to Raymond and gestured for the door. “You’re right.”

* * * * *

One block south and two blocks east, Raymond and Rachel passed a construction site, abandoned and in disarray. Two workers in their bright orange vests lounged against the wire fence lining the sidewalk. They stared at a loose pile of dirt, penetrating and unsure.

Police cars surrounded a building across the street, one cop holding a megaphone to his side and staring straight up. Raymond followed the cop’s gaze, spotting a young woman standing on the ledge of the roof of the 10-story high-rise office tower. He was surprised that this was the first suicide attempt he bumped into today.

“Jack left for work this morning as usual, said he’d walk. Said it was warm enough to forego a cab or something,” said Rachel. “I called what’s-her-face at the front desk at your work. Nothing.”

“Was he a churchgoer?” asked Raymond to make small talk, positive of the answer.

“Just for weddings,” said Rachel. “But he was the first one out when they ended.”

Raymond suggested tracing Jack’s path to work, even though Rachel already had, twice. He didn’t want to underestimate the power of a second set of eyes, or a calmer mindset.

For once, though, Raymond’s subdued, laidback demeanor fit in during a crisis. Besides Rachel and that woman on the roof, people droned out of their offices like zombies. There was little fighting the Rapture, fewer tears. It was as if a day’s work encouraged resignation. Capitalism was still in check, and there was a line outside the Starbucks by Merchandise Mart.

As they crossed back over the river, Rachel pointed down to the Riverwalk, the stretch of sidewalk under Wacker Drive that provided a front-row seat for the discolored river waters. Police were cleaning up a broken scene. A taxi was crushed and in pieces, the hood flung open, shards of glass surrounding it. The event was clear: As the cab drove through the light on Wacker, the driver was gathered, and the car continued on its speedy taxi-driver path off the road, sideways down the opening where the stairs took tourists from the busy street to the empty Riverwalk below, the vehicle mashing headfirst into the cement sidewalk. It was smashed so badly it sat at a three-fourths angle, like the right side was hovering thanks to the deconstructed left side.

“They’ve been trying to clean up that mess since this morning,” said Rachel. “They probably have so much to deal with they had to get to the larger disasters first.”

Paramedics lifted two distant bodies pulled from the wreckage onto gurneys. They were tall.

“You’re sure Jack wouldn’t have grabbed a cab, right? Should we check on that?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t” said Rachel. “If only to spite me that I thought it was too cold to walk.”

Raymond agreed with the assessment, but he had to see the accident. He was disappointed in how few action flick-style accidents and explosions resulted from the gatherings, and here he had a shot to discover some actual results, a horrible tale to share at cocktail parties. With the decadent still roaming the streets, Raymond knew there’d be more cocktail parties.

He hopped down the stairs to the Riverwalk, not with a spring in his step, but a hustle, the way you move when you’re alone and have no reason to linger. Rachel stayed several steps behind.

The cops had the scene taped off, of course, but Raymond was able to get within feet of the accident, to the point where a piece of windshield sat at his left foot. It was a mess. Only up close could Raymond see the pieces of wood lying to the sides of the cab, scraps of a bench that it careened into, hopefully unoccupied. The damage in front of him proved to Raymond what he’d been considering all day—that we do a lot to help other people in what we don’t do, in not driving off the road or letting construction sites go to hell.

“Is everyone okay?” Raymond asked the nearest cop, assuming it would be the simplest question to get an answer to.

The cop looked at Raymond and laughed. “What’s it look like, buddy? There was a guy in the backseat and a guy on the bench, just sitting there, thinking or something.”

The paramedics started wheeling away the bodies, back into Lower Wacker, where no doubt an ambulance awaited, to flee to the nearest overcrowded hospital. One body was now entirely covered by a white sheet, while the other had its sheet caught halfway in the side of the gurney, slipped just a bit off his face, his barely recognizable—but still recognizable—face.

Raymond could tell it was Jack. He also knew Jack would never take a cab, just as Rachel suspected, out of spite. He must have been sitting on the bench, thinking, about God knows what. Jack wasn’t that deep, thought Raymond, as the body was taken away.

“What’s going on?” asked Rachel, coming up behind Raymond.

Raymond turned, with conviction. “Nothing,” he said, and they headed back up the steps to keep searching.